
Book, .C-v 



IRISH IMPRESSIONS 



THE HISTORY OF 
RUHLEBEN 

By JOSEPH POWELL (Captain of the Camp) 
AND FRANCIS GRIBBLE 10/6 net 

TRUE LOVE 

By ALLAN MONKHOUSE 7/- net 

THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN 

By FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG 7/- net 

A GARDEN OF PEACE 

By F. LITTLEMORE 10/6 net 

NEW WINE 

By AGNES and EGERTON CASTLE 7/- net 

MADELEINE 

By hope MIRRLEES 7/- net 



COLLINS - LONDON 



IRISH IMPRESSIONS 

by G. K. CHESTERTON £J 




LONDON: 48 PALL MALL 

W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD. 

GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND 









\<^ 



Copyright 

First Impression, November, 19 19 
Second „ January, 1920 



CONTENTS 



PAOB 



I. TWO STONES IN A SQUARE I 

II. THE ROOT OF REALITY I? 

III. THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 45 

IV. THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 67 
V. THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 93 

VI. THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND II 5 

VII. THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND I4I 

VIII. AN EXAMPLE AND A QUESTION 173 

IX. BELFAST AND THE RELIGIOUS 

PROBLEM 207 



CHAPTER I 



TWO STONES IN A SQUARE 

When I had for the first time crossed St 
George's Channel, and for the first time stepped 
out of a DubHn hotel on to St Stephen's Green, 
the first of all my impressions was that of a 
particular statue, or rather portion of a statue. 
I left many traditional mysteries already in my 
track, but they did not trouble me as did this 
random glimpse or vision. I have never under- 
stood why the Channel is called St George's 
Channel ; it would seem more natural to call it 
St Patrick's Channel since the great missionary 
did almost certainly cross that unquiet sea and 
look up at those mysterious mountains. And 
though I should be enchanted, in an abstract 
artistic sense, to imagine St George sailing 
towards the sunset, flying the silver and scarlet 
colours of his cross, I cannot in fact regard that 

3 



TWO STONES IN A SQUARE 

journey as the most fortunate of the adventures 
of that flag. Nor, for that matter, do I know 
why the Green should be called St Stephen *s 
Green, nor why the parliamentary enclosure at 
Westminster is also connected with the first 
of the martyrs; unless it be because St Stephen 
was killed with stones. The stones, piled 
together to make modern political buildings, 
might perhaps be regarded as a cairn, or heap 
of missiles, marking the place of the murder of 
a witness to the truth. And while it seems 
unlikely that St Stephen was pelted with 
statues as well as stones, there are undoubtedly 
statues that might well kill a Christian at sight. 
Among these graven stones, from which the 
saints suffer, I should certainly include some of 
those figures in frock coats standing opposite 
St Stephen's Westminster. There are many 
such statues in Dublin also; but the one with 
which I am concerned was at first partially 
veiled from me. And the veil was at least as 
symbolic as the vision. 

I saw what seemed the crooked hind legs of a 
4 



TWO STONES IN A SQUARE 

horse on a pedestal and deduced an equestrian 
statue, in the somewhat bloated fashion of the 
early eighteenth century equestrian statues. 
But the figure, from where I stood, was wholly 
hidden in the tops of trees growing round it in 
a ring ; masking it with leafy curtains or draping 
it with leafy banners. But they were green 
banners, that waved and glittered all about it 
in the sunlight; and the face they hid was the 
face of an English king. Or rather, to speak 
more correctly, a German king. 

When laws can stay ... it was impossible 
that an old rhyme should not run in my head, 
and words that appealed to the everlasting 
revolt of the green things of the earth. . . . 
* And when the leaves in summer time their 
colour dare not show.* The rhyme seemed to 
reach me out of remote times and find arresting 
fulfilment, like a prophecy; it was impossible 
not to feel that I had seen an omen. I was 
conscious vaguely of a vision of green garlands 
hung on gray stone; and the wreaths were 
living and growing, and the stone was dead. 

5 



TWO STONES IN A SQUARE 

Something in the simple substances and ele- 
mental colours, in the white sunlight, and the 
sombre and even secret image held the mind 
for a moment in the midst of all the moving 
city, like a sign given in a dream. I was told 
that the figure was that of one of the first 
Georges ; but indeed I seemed to know already 
that it was the White Horse of Hanover that 
had thus grown gray with Irish weather or 
green with Irish foliage. I knew only too well, 
already, that the George who had really crossed 
the Channel was not the saint. This was one 
of those German princes whom the English 
aristocracy used when it made the English 
domestic polity aristocratic and the English 
foreign policy German. Those Englishmen 
who think the Irish are pro-German, or those 
Irishmen who think the Irish ought to be pro- 
German, would presumably expect the Dublin 
populace to have hung the statue of this 
German deliverer with national ilowcrs and 
nationalist flags. For some reason, however, 
I found no traces of Irish tributes round the 

6 



TWO STONES IN A SQUARE 

pedestal of the Teutonic horsemen. I won- 
dered how many people in the last fifty years 
have ever cared about it, or even been conscious 
of their own carelessness. I wonder how many 
have ever troubled to look at it, or even troubled 
not to look at it. If it fell down, I wonder 
whether anybody would put it up again. I do 
not know; I only know that Irish gardeners, 
or some such Irish humorists, had planted trees 
in a ring round that prancing equestrian 
figure; trees that had, so to speak, sprung up 
and choked him, making him more unrecognis- 
able than a Jack-in-the-Green. Jack or George 
had vanished; but the Green remained. 

About a stone*s-throw from this calamity in 
stone there stood, at the corner of a gorgeously 
coloured flower-walk, a bust evidently by a 
modern sculptor, with modern symbolic orna- 
ment surmounted by the fine falcon face of the 
poet Mangan, who dreamed and drank and 
died, a thoughtless and thriftless outcast, in 
the darkest of the Dublin streets around that 
place. This individual Irishman really was 

7 



TWO STONES IN A SQUARE 

what we were told that all Irishmen were, hope- 
less, heedless, irresponsible, impossible, a 
tragedy of failure. And yet it seemed to be his 
head that was lifted and not hidden; the gay 
flowers only showed up this graven image as 
the green leaves shut out the other ; everything 
around him seemed bright and busy, and told 
rather of a new time. It was clear that modern 
men did stop to look at hm\ indeed modern 
men had stayed there long enough to make 
him a monument. It was almost certain that 
if his monument fell down it really would 
be put up again. I think it very likely there 
would be competition among advanced modern 
artistic schools of admitted crankiness and 
unimpeachable lunacy; that somebody would 
want to cut out a Cubist Mangan in a style less 
of stone than of bricks ; or to set up a Vorticist 
Mangan, like a frozen whirlpool, to terrify the 
children playing in that flowery lane. For 
when I afterwards went into the Dublin Art 
Club, or mixed generally in the stimulating 
society of the intellectuals of the Irish capital, 

8 



TWO STONES IN A SQUARE 

I found a multitude of things which moved 
both my admiration and amusement. Perhaps 
the best thing of all was that it was the one 
society that I have seen where the intellectuals 
were intellectual. But nothing pleased me more 
than the fact that even Irish art was taken with 
a certain Irish pugnacity; as if there could be 
street fights about aesthetics as there once were 
about theology. I could almost imagine an 
appeal for pikes to settle a point about art 
needlework, or a suggestion of dying on the 
barricades for a difference about bookbinding. 
And I could still more easily imagine a sort of 
ultra-civilised civil war round the half-restored 
bust of poor Mangan. But it was in a yet 
plainer and more popular sense that I felt that 
bust to be the sign of a new world, where the 
statue of Royal George was only the ruin of an 
old one. And though I have since seen many 
much more complex, and many decidedly 
contradictory things in Ireland, the allegory of 
those two stone images in that public garden 
has remained in my memory, and has not been 

9 



TWO STONES IN A SQUARE 

reversed. The Glorious Revolution, the great 
Protestant Deliverer, the Hanoverian Succes- 
sion, these things were the very pageant and 
apotheosis of success. The Whig aristocrat 
was not merely victorious; it was as a victor 
that he asked for victory. The thing was fully 
expressed in all the florid and insolent statuary 
of the period, in all those tumid horsemen in 
Roman uniform and rococo periwigs shown 
as prancing in perpetual motion down shouting 
streets to their triumphs; only to-day the 
streets are empty and silent, and the horse 
stands still. Of such a kind was the imperial 
figure round which the ring of trees had risen, 
like great green fans to soothe a sultan or great 
green curtains to guard him. But it was in a 
sort of mockery that his pavilion was thus 
painted with the colour of his conquered 
enemies. For the king was dead behind his 
curtains, his voice will be heard no more, and 
no man will even wish to hear it, while the 
world endures. The dynastic eighteenth cen- 
tury is dead if anything is dead; and these 

10 



TWO STONES IN A SQUARE 

idols at least are only stones. But only a few 
yards away, the stone that the builders rejected 
is really the head of a corner, standing at the 
corner of a new pathway, coloured and crowded 
with children and with flowers. 

That, I suspect, is the paradox of Ireland in 
the modern world. Everything that was 
thought progressive as a prancing horse has 
come to a standstill. Everything that was 
thought decadent as a dying drunkard has 
risen from the dead. All that seemed to have 
reached a cul de sac has turned the corner, and 
stands at the opening of a new road. All that 
thought itself on a pedestal has found itself up 
a tree. And that is why those two chance stones 
seem to me to stand like graven images on either 
side of the gateway by which a man enters 
Ireland. And yet I had not left the same small 
enclosure till I had seen one other sight which 
was even more symbolic than the flowers near 
the foot of the poet's pedestal. A few yards 
beyond the Mangan bust was a model plot of 
vegetables, like a kitchen garden with no 

I.I. II B 



TWO STONES IN A SQUARE 

kitchen or house attached to it, planted out in 
a patchwork of potatoes, cabbages, and turnips, 
to prove how much could be done with an acre. 
And I realised as in a vision that all over the 
new Ireland that patch is repeated like a pattern ; 
and where there is a real kitchen garden there 
is also a real kitchen ; and it is not a communal 
kitchen. It is more typical even than the poet 
and the flowers ; for these flowers are also food, 
and this poetry is also property; property 
which, when properly distributed, is the poetry 
of the average man. It was only afterwards 
that I could realise all the realities to which this 
accident corresponded; but even this little 
public experiment, at the first glance, had some- 
thing of the meaning of a public monument. 
It was this which the earth itself had reared 
against the monstrous image of the German 
monarch; and I might have called this chapter 
Cabbages and Kings. 

My life is passed in making bad jokes and 
seeing them turn into true prophecies. In the 
little town in South Bucks, where I live, I 

12 



TWO STONES IN A SQUARE 

remember some talk of appropriate ceremonies 
in connection with the work of sending vege- 
tables to the Fleet. There was a suggestion 
that some proceedings should end with * God 
Save the King,' an amendment by some one 
(of a more naval turn of mind) to substitute 
* Rule Britannia '; and the opposition of one 
individual, claiming to be of Irish extraction, 
who loudly refused to lend a voice to either. 
Whatever I retain, in such rural scenes, of the 
frivolity of Fleet Street led me to suggest that 
we could all join in singing * The Wearing of 
the Greens.* But I have since discovered that 
this remark, like other typical utterances of the 
village idiot, was in truth inspired; and was a 
revelation and a vision from across the sea, 
a vision of what was really being done, not by 
the village idiots but by the village wise men. 
For the whole miracle of modern Ireland might 
well be summed up in the simple change from 
the word * green * to the word * greens.* Nor 
would it be true to say that the first is poetical 
and the second practical. For a green tree is 

13 



TWO STONES IN A SQUARE 

quite as poetical as a green flag ; and no one in 
touch with history doubts that the waving of 
the green flag has been very useful to the grow- 
ing of the green tree. But I shall have to touch 
upon all such controversial topics later, for 
those to whom such statements are still contro- 
versial. Here I would only begin by recording 
a first impression as vividly coloured and 
patchy as a modernist picture; a square of 
green things growing where they are least 
expected; the new vision of Ireland. The dis- 
covery, for most Englishmen, will be like 
touching the trees of a faded tapestry, and 
finding the forest alive and full of birds. It 
will be as if, on some dry urn or dreary column, 
figures which had already begun to crumble 
magically began to move and dance. For 
culture as well as mere caddishness assumed 
the decay of these Celtic or Catholic things; 
there were artists sketching the ruins as well as 
trippers picnicking in them ; and it was not the 
only evidence that a final silence had fallen on 
the harp of Tara, that it did not play 
14 



TWO STONES IN A SQUARE 

* Tararaboomdeay.* Englishmen believed in 
Irish decay even when they were large-minded 
enough to lament it. It might be said that 
those who were most penitent because the thing 
was murdered, were most convinced that it was 
killed. The meaning of these green and solid 
things before me is that it is not a ghost that 
has risen from the grave. A flower, like a flag, 
might be little more than a ghost; but a fruit 
has that sacramental solidity which in all 
mythologies belongs not to a ghost, but to a 
god. This sight of things sustaining, and a 
beauty that nourishes and does not merely 
charm, was a premonition of practicality in the 
miracle of modern Ireland. It is a miracle more 
marvellous than the resurrection of the dead. 
It is the resurrection of the body. 



«5 



CHAPTER II 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

The only excuse of literature is to make things 
new; and the chief misfortune of journalism is 
that it has to make them old. What is hurried 
has to be hackneyed. Suppose a man has to 
write on a particular subject, let us say America; 
if he has a day to do it in, it is possible that, in 
the last afterglow of sunset, he may have dis- 
covered at least one thing which he himself 
really thinks about America. It is conceivable 
that somewhere under the evening star he may 
have a new idea, even about the new world, if 
he has only half an hour in which to write, he 
will just have time to consult an encyclopaedia 
and vaguely remember the latest leading articles. 
The encyclopaedia will be only about a decade 
out of date; the leading articles will be aeons out 
of date — having been written under similar 

19 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

conditions of modern rush. If he has only a 
quarter of an hour in which to write about 
America, he may be driven in mere delirium and 
madness to call her his Gigantic Daughter in 
the West, to talk of the feasibility of Hands 
Across the Sea, or even to call himself an Anglo- 
Saxon, when he might as well call himself a 
Jute. But whatever debasing banality be the 
effect of business scurry in criticsm, it is but one 
example of a truth that can be tested in twenty 
fields of experience. If a man must get to 
Brighton as quickly as possible, he can get 
there quickest by travelling on rigid rails on a 
recognised route. If he has time and money 
for motoring, he will still use public roads; 
but he will be surprised to find how many 
public roads look as new and quiet as private 
roads. If he has time enough to walk, he may 
find for himself a string of fresh footpaths, each 
one a fairy-tale. This law of the leisure needed 
for the awakening of wonder applies, indeed, 
to things superficially familiar as well as to 
things superficially fresh. The chief case for 
20 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

old enclosures and boundaries is that they 
enclose a space in which new things can always 
be found later, like live fish within the four 
corners of a net. The chief charm of having 
a home that is secure is having leisure to feel 
it as strange. 

I have often done the little I could to correct 
the stale trick of taking things for granted: 
all the more because it is not even taking them 
for granted. It is taking them without grati- 
tude; that is, emphatically as not granted. 
Even one's own front door, released by one's 
own latchkey, should not only open inward on 
things familiar, but outward on things unknown. 
Even one's own domestic fireside should be 
wild as well as domesticated ; for nothing could 
be wilder than fire. But if this light of the 
higher ignorance should shine even on familiar 
places, it should naturally shine most clearly 
on the roads of a strange land. It would be well 
if a man could enter Ireland really knowing 
that he knows nothing about Ireland; if 
possible, not even the name of Ireland. The 

21 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

misfortune is that most men know the name 
too well, and the thing too little. This book 
would probably be a better book, as well as a 
better joke, if I were to call the island through- 
out by some name like Atlantis, and only 
reveal on the last page that I was referring to 
Ireland. Englishmen would see a situation of 
great interest, objects with which they could 
feel considerable sympathy, and opportunities 
of which they might take considerable advan- 
tage, if only they would really look at the place 
plain and straight, as they would at some 
entirely new island, with an entirely new name, 
discovered by that seafaring adventure which 
is the real romance of England. In short, the 
Englishman might do something with it, if he 
would only treat it as an object in front of him, 
and not as a subject or story left behind him. 
There will be occasion later to say all that 
should be said of the need of studying the 
Irish story. But the Irish story is one thing 
and what is called the Irish Question quite 
another; and in a purely practical sense the 
22 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

best thing the stranger can do is to forget the 
Irish Question and look at the Irish. If he 
looked at them simply and steadily, as he 
would look at the natives of an entirely new 
nation with a new name, he would become 
conscious of a very strange but entirely solid 
fact. He would become conscious of it, as a 
man in a fairy tale might become conscious 
that he had crossed the border of fairyland, 
by such a trifle as a talking cow or a hay- 
stack walking about on legs. 

For the Irish Question has never been dis- 
cussed in England. Men have discussed Home 
Rule; but those who advocated it most warmly, 
and as I think wisely, did not even know what 
the Irish meant by Home. Men have talked 
about Unionism; but they have never even 
dared to propose Union. A Unionist ought 
to mean a man who is not even conscious of the 
boundary of the two countries ; who can walk 
across the frontier of fairyland, and not even 
notice the walking haystack. As a fact, the 
Unionist always shoots at the haystack ; though 
23 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

he never hits it. But the limitation is not 
limited to Unionists; as I have already said, 
the English Radicals have been quite as in- 
capable of going to the root of the matter. 
Half the case for Home Rule was that Ireland 
could not be trusted to the English Home 
Rulers. They also, to recur to the parable, 
have been unable to take the talking cow by 
the horns ; for I need hardly say that the talking 
cow is an Irish bull. What has been the matter 
with their Irish politics was simply that they 
were English politics. They discussed the 
Irish Question; but they never seriously 
contemplated the Irish Answer. That is, the 
Liberal was content with the negative truth, 
that the Irish should not be prevented from 
having the sort of law they liked. But the 
Liberal seldom faced the positive truth, about 
what sort of law they would like. He instinc- 
tively avoided the very imagination of this ; for 
the simple reason that the law the Irish would 
like is as remote from what is called Liberal as 
from what is called Unionist. Nor has the 
24 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

Liberal ever embraced it in his broadest liber- 
ality, nor the Unionist ever absorbed it into his 
most complete unification. It remains outside 
us altogether, a thing to be stared at like a fairy- 
cow; and by far the wisest English visitor is 
he who will simply stare at it. Sooner or later 
he will see what it means; which is simply 
this: that whether it be a case for coercion or 
emancipation (and it might be used either way) 
the fact is that a free Ireland would not only 
not be what we call lawless, but might not even 
be what we call free. So far from being an 
anarchy, it would be an orderly and even 
conservative civilisation — like the Chinese. 
But it would be a civilisation so fundamentally 
different from our own, that our own Liberals 
would differ from it as much as our own 
Conservatives. The fair question for an English- 
man is whether that fundamental difference 
would make division dangerous; it has already 
made union impossible. Now in turning over 
these notes of so brief a visit, suffering from all 
the stale scurry of my journalistic trade, I have 
25 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

been in doubt between a chronological and a 
logical order of events. But I have decided in 
favour of logic, of the high light that really 
revealed the picture, and by which I firmly 
believe that everything else should be seen. 
And if any one were to ask me what was the 
sight that struck me most in Ireland, both as 
strange and as significant, I should know what 
to reply. I saw it long after I had seen the 
Irish cities, had felt something of the brilliant 
bitterness of Dublin and the stagnant optimism 
of Belfast; but I put it first here because I am 
certain that without it all the rest is meaning- 
less; that it lies behind all politics, enormous 
and silent, as the great hills lie beyond Dublin. 
I was moving in a hired motor down a road 
in the North- West, towards the middle of that 
rainy autumn. I was not moving very fast; 
because the progress was slowed down to a 
solemn procession by crowds of families with 
their cattle and live stock going to the market 
beyond; which things also are an allegory. 
But what struck my mind and stuck in it was 
26 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

this ; that all down one side of the road, as far 
as we went, the harvest was gathered in neatly 
and safely; and all down the other side of the 
road it was rotting in the rain. Now the side 
where it was safe was a string of small plots 
worked by peasant proprietors, as petty by our 
standards as a row of the cheapest villas. The 
land on which all the harvest was wasted was 
the land of a large modern estate. I asked why 
the landlord was later with his harvesting than 
the peasants; and I was told rather vaguely 
that there had been strikes and similar labour 
troubles. I did not go into the rights of the 
matter; but the point here is that, whatever 
they were, the moral is the same. You may 
curse the cruel Capitalist landlord or you may 
rave at the ruffianly Bolshevist strikers; but 
you must admit that between them they had 
produced a stoppage, which the peasant pro- 
prietorship a few yards off did not produce. 
You might support either where they conflicted, 
but you could not deny the sense in which they 
had combined, and combined to prevent what 
I.I. 27 c 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

a few rustics across the road could combine to 
produce. For all that we in England agree 
about and disagree about, all for which we 
fight and all from which we differ, our darkness 
and our light, our heaven and hell, were there 
on the left side of the road. On the right side 
of the road lay something so different that we 
do not even differ from it. It may be that 
Trusts are rising like towers of gold and iron, 
overshadowing the earth and shutting out the 
sun; but they are only rising on the left side 
of the road. It may be that Trade Unions are 
laying labyrinths of international insurrection, 
cellars stored with the dynamite of a merely 
destructive democracy; but all that inter- 
national m.aze lies to the left side of the road. 
Employment and unemployment are there; 
Marx and the Manchester School are there. 
The left side of the road may even go through 
amazing transformations of its own ; its story 
may stride across abysses of anarchy; but it 
will never step across the road. The landlord's 
estate may become a sort of Morris Utopia, 
28 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

organised communally by Socialists, or more 
probably by Guild Socialists. It may (as I fear 
is much more likely) pass through the stage of 
an employer's model village to the condition of 
an old pagan slave-estate. But the peasants 
across the road would not only refuse the 
Servile State, but would quite as resolutely 
refuse the Utopia. Europe may seem to be 
torn from end to end by the blast of a Bolshevist 
trumpet, sundering the bourgeois from the 
proletarian; but the peasant across the road is 
neither a bourgeois nor a proletarian. England 
may seem to be rent by an irreconcilable rivalry 
between Capital and Labour; but the peasant 
across the road is both a capitalist and a labourer. 
He is several other curious things; including 
the man who got his crops in first; who was 
literally first in the field. 

To an Englishman, especially a Londoner, 
this was like walking to the corner of a London 
street and finding the policeman in rags, with 
a patch on his trousers and a smudge on his 
face; but the crossing-sweeper wearing a 
29 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

single eyeglass and a suit fresh from a West 
End tailor. In fact, it was nearly as surprising 
as a walking haystack or a talking cow. What 
was generally dingy, dilatory, and down-at- 
heels was here comparatively tidy and timely; 
what was orderly and organised was belated 
and abandoned. For it must be sharply 
realised that the peasant proprietors succeeded 
here, not only because they were really pro- 
prietors, but because they were only peasants. 
It was because they were on a small scale that 
they were a great success. It was because they 
were too poor to have servants that they grew 
rich in spite of strikers. It was, so far as it 
went, the flattest possible contradiction to all 
that is said in England, both by Collectivists 
and Capitalists, about the efficiency of the great 
organisation. For in so far as it had failed, it 
had actually failed, not only through being 
great, but through being organised. On the 
left side of the road the big machine had stopped 
working, because it was a big machine. The 
small men were still working, because they 
30 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

were not machines. Such were the strange 
relations of the two things, that the stars in 
their courses fought against Capitalism; that 
the very clouds rolling over that rocky valley 
warred for its pigmies against its giants. The 
rain falls aUke on the just and the unjust; yet 
here it had not fallen alike on the rich and poor. 
It had fallen to the destruction of the rich. 

Now I do, as a point of personal opinion, 
believe that the right side of the road was 
really the right side of the road. That is, I 
believe it represented the right side of the 
question; that these little pottering peasants 
had got hold of the true secret, which is missed 
both by Capitalism and Collectivism. But I 
am not here urging my own preferences on my 
own countrymen; and I am not concerned 
primarily to point out that this is an argument 
against Capitalism and Collectivism. What I 
do point out is that it is the fundamental argu- 
ment against Unionism. Perhaps it is, on that 
ultimate level, the only argument against 
Unionism; which is probably why it is never 
31 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

used against Unionists. I mean, of course, 
that it was never really used against English 
Unionists by English Home Rulers, in the 
recriminations of that Irish Question which 
was really an English Question. The essential 
demanded of that question was merely that it 
should be an open question ; a thing rather like 
an open wound. Modern industrial society is 
fond of problems, and therefore not at all fond 
of solutions. A consideration of those who 
really have understood this fundamental fact 
will be sufficient to show how confusing and 
useless are the mere party labels in the matter. 
George Wyndham was a Unionist who was 
deposed because he was a Home Ruler. Sir 
Horace Plunkett is a Unionist who is trusted 
because he is a Home Ruler. By far the most 
revolutionary piece of Nationalism that was 
ever really effected for Ireland was effected by 
Wyndham, who was an EngUsh Tory squire. 
And by far the most brutal and brainless piece 
of Unionism that was ever imposed on Ireland 
was imposed in the name of the Radical theory 
32 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

of Free Trade, when the Irish juries brought in 
verdicts of wilful murder against Lord John 
Russell. I say this to show that my sense of 
a reality is quite apart from the personal acci- 
dent that I have myself always been a Radical 
in English politics, as well as a Home Ruler in 
Irish politics. But I say it even more in order 
to re-affirm that the English have first to forget 
all their old formulae and look at a new fact. 
It is not a new fact; but it is new to them. 

To realise it we must not only go outside 
the British parties but outside the British 
Empire, outside the very universe of the ordin- 
ary Briton. The real question can be easily 
stated, for it is as simple as it is large. What is 
going to happen to the peasantries of Europe, 
or for that matter of the whole world ? It 
would be far better, as I have already suggested, 
if we could consider it as a new case of some 
peasantry in Europe, or somewhere else in the 
world. It would be far better if we ceased to 
talk of Ireland and Scotland, and began to talk 
of Ireland and Serbia. Let us, for the sake of 
33 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

our own mental composure, call this unfortu- 
nate people Slovenes. But let us realise that 
these remote Slovenes are, by the testimony of 
every truthful traveller, rooted in the habit of 
private property, and now ripening into a 
considerable private prosperity. It will often 
be necessary to remember that the Slovenes are 
Roman Catholics; and that, with that im- 
patient pugnacity which marks the Slovene 
temperament, they have often employed 
violence, but always for the restoration of what 
they regarded as a reasonable system of private 
property. Now in a hundred determining 
districts, of which France is the most famous, 
this system has prospered. It has its own faults 
as well as its own merits; but it has prospered. 
What is going to happen to it ? I will here 
confine myself to saying with the most solid 
confidence what is not going to happen to it. 
It is not going to be real/y ruled by Socialists; 
and it is not going to be really ruled by merchant 
princes, like those who ruled Venice or like 
those who rule England. 
34 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

It is not merely that England ought not to 
rule Ireland but that England cannot. It is not 
merely that Englishmen cannot rule Irish- 
men, but that merchants cannot rule peasants. 
It is not so much that we have dealt benefits 
to England and blows to Ireland. It is 
that our benefits for England would be blows 
to Ireland. And this we already began to admit 
in practice, before we had even dimly begun to 
conceive it in theory. We do not merely admit 
it in special laws against Ireland like the 
Coercion Acts, or special laws in favour of 
Ireland like the Land Acts; it is admitted even 
more by specially exempting Ireland than by 
specially studying Ireland. In other words, 
whatever else the Unionists want, they do not 
want to unite; they are not quite so mad as 
that. I cannot myself conceive any purpose 
in having one parliament except to pass one 
law; and one law for England and Ireland is 
simply something that becomes more insanely 
impossible every day. If the two societies were 
stationary, they would be sufficiently separate; 
35 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

but they are both moving rapidly in opposite 
directions. England may be moving towards 
a condition which some call Socialism and I 
call Slavery; but whatever it is, Ireland is 
speeding farther and farther from it. What- 
ever it is, the men who manage it will no more 
be able to manage a European peasantry than 
the peasants in these mud cabins could manage 
the Stock Exchange. All attempts, whether 
imperial or international, to lump these peasants 
along with some large and shapeless thing called 
Labour, are part of a cosmopolitan illusion 
which sees mankind as a map. The world of 
the International is a pill, as round and as 
small. It is true that all men want health; but 
it is certainly not true that all men want the 
same medicine. Let us allow the cosmopolitan 
to survey the world from China to Peru; but 
do not let us allow the chemist to identify 
Chinese opium and Peruvian bark. 

My parallel about the Slovenes was only a 
fancy; yet I can give a real parallel from the 
Slavs which is a fact. It was a fact from my 

36 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

own experience in Ireland; and it exactly 
illustrates the real international sympathies of 
peasants. Their internationalism has nothing 
to do with the International. I had not been 
in Ireland many hours when several people 
mentioned to me with considerable excitement 
some news from the Continent. They were 
not, strange as it may seem, dancing with joy 
over the disaster of Caporetto, or glowing with 
admiration of the Crown Prince. Few really 
rejoiced in EngHsh defeats; and none really 
rejoiced in German victories. It was news 
about the Bolshevists; but it was not the news 
of how nobly they had given votes to the 
Russian women, nor of how savagely they had 
fired bullets into the Russian princesses. It 
was the news of a check to the Bolshevists; 
but it was not a glorification of Kerensky or 
Korniloff, or any of the newspaper heroes who 
seem to have satisfied us all, so long as their 
names began with K and nobody knew any- 
thing about them. In short, it was nothing that 
could be found in all our myriad newspaper 
37 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

articles on the subject. I would give an 
educated Englishman a hundred guesses about 
what it was ; but even if he knew it he would 
not know what it meant. 

It had appeared in the little paper about 
peasant produce so successfully conducted by- 
Mr George Russell, the admirable * A. E.,* 
and it was told me eagerly by the poet himself, 
by a learned and brilliant Jesuit, and by several 
other people, as the great news from Europe. 
It was simply the news that the Jewish Socialists 
of the Bolshevist Government had been attempt- 
ing to confiscate the peasants* savings in the 
co-operative banks; and had been forced to 
desist. And they spoke of it as of a great 
battle won on the Danube or the Rhine. That 
is what I mean when I say that these people are 
of a pattern and belong to a system which cuts 
across all our own political divisions. They 
felt themselves fighting the Socialist as fiercely 
as any Capitalist can feel it. But they not only 
knew what they were fighting against, but what 
they were fighting for ; which is more than the 

38 



THE ROOT OF RFALITY 

Capitalist does. I do not know how far modern 
Europe really shows a menace of Bolshevism, 
or how far merely a panic of Capitalism. But 
I know that if any honest resistance has to be 
offered to mere robbery, the resistance of 
Ireland will be the most honest, and probably 
the most important. It may be that inter- 
national Israel will launch against us out of the 
East an insane simplification of the unity of 
Man, as Islam once launched out of the East 
an insane simplification of the unity of God. 
If it be so, it is where property is well distri- 
buted that it will be well defended. The post 
of honour will be with those who fight in very 
truth for their own land. If ever there came 
such a drive of wild dervishes against us, 
it would be the chariots and elephants of 
plutocracy that would roll in confusion and 
rout; and the squares of the peasant infantry 
would stand. 

Anyhow, the first fact to realise is that we 
are dealing with a European peasantry; and 
it would be really better, as I say, to think of 
39 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

it first as a Continental peasantry. There are 
numberless important inferences from this 
fact; but there is one point, politically topical 
and urgent, on which I may well touch here. 
It will be well to understand about this 
peasantry something that we generally mis- 
understand, even about a Continental peasantry. 
English tourists in France or Italy commonly 
make the mistake of supposing that the people 
cheat, because the people bargain, or attempt 
to bargain. When a peasant asks tenpence for 
something that is worth fourpence, the tourist 
misunderstands the whole problem. He 
commonly solves it by calling the man a thief 
and paying the tenpence. There are ten 
thousand errors in this, beginning with the 
primary error of an oligarchy, of treating a 
man as a servant when he feels more like a 
small squire. The peasant does not choose to 
receive insults; but he never expected to 
receive tenpence. A man who understood him 
would simply suggest twopence, in a calm and 
courteous manner ; and the two would eventually 
40 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

meet in the middle at a perfectly just price. 
There would not be what we call a fixed price 
at the beginning, but there would be a very 
firmly fixed price at the end : that is, the bargain 
once made would be a sacredly sealed contract. 
The peasant, so far from cheating, has his own 
horror of cheating; and certainly his own fury 
at being cheated. Now in the political bargain 
with the English, the Irish simply think they 
have been cheated. They think Home Rule 
was stolen from them after the contract was 
sealed; and it will be hard for any one to 
contradict them. If ' le Rot le veult * is not a 
sacred seal on a contract, what is ? The senti- 
ment is stronger because the contract was a 
compromise. Home Rule was the fourpence 
and not the tenpence; and, in perfect loyalty 
to the peasant's code of honour, they have now 
reverted to the tenpence. The Irish have now 
returned in a reaction of anger to their most 
extreme demands; not because we denied what 
they demanded, but because we denied what 
we accepted. As I shall have occasion to note, 
41 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

there are other and wilder elements in the 
quarrel ; but the first fact to remember is that 
the quarrel began with a bargain, that it will 
probably have to end with another bargain; 
and that it will be a bargain with peasants. On 
the whole, in spite of abominable blunders and 
bad faith, I think there is still a chance of 
bargaining, but we must see that there is no 
chance of cheating. We may haggle like 
peasants, and remember that their first offer is 
not necessarily their last. But we must be as 
honest as peasants; and that is a hard saying 
for politicians. The great Parnell, a squire who 
had many of the qualities of a peasant (qualities 
the English so wildly misunderstood as to 
think them English, when they were really 
very Irish) converted his people from a Fenian- 
ism fiercer than Sinn Fein to a Home Rule more 
moderate than that which any sane statesman- 
ship would now offer to Ireland. But the 
peasants trusted Parnell, not because they 
thought he was asking for it, but because they 
thought he could get it. Whatever we decide 
42 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

to give to Ireland, we must give it; it is now 
worse than useless to promise it. I will say 
here, once and for all, the hardest thing that an 
Englishman has to say of his impressions of 
another great European people; that over all 
those hills and valleys our word is wind, and 
our bond is waste paper. 

But, in any case, the peasantry remains : and 
the whole weight of the matter is that it will 
remain. It is much more certain to remain 
than any of the commercial or colonial systems 
that will have to bargain with it. We may 
honestly think that the British Empire is both 
more liberal and more lasting than the Austrian 
Empire, or other large political combinations. 
But a combination like the Austrian Empire 
could go to pieces, and ten such combinations 
could go to pieces, before people like the 
Serbians ceased to desire to be peasants, and 
to demand to be free peasants. And the 
British combination, precisely because it is a 
combination and not a community, is in its 
nature more lax and liable to real schism than 

I.I. 43 D 



THE ROOT OF REALITY 

this sort of community, which might almost be 
called a communion. Any attack on it is like 
an attempt to abolish grass; which is not only 
the symbol of it in the old national song, but 
it is a very true symbol of it in any new philo- 
sophic history; a symbol of its equality, its 
ubiquity, its multiplicity, and its mighty power 
to return. To fight against grass is to fight 
against God; we can only so mismanage our 
own city and our own citizenship that the grass 
grows in our own streets. And even then it is 
our streets that will be dead; and the grass 
will still be alive. 



44 



CHAPTER III 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

There was an old joke of my childhood, to the 
effect that men might be grouped together with 
reference to their Christian names. I have 
forgotten the cases then under consideration; 
but contemporary examples would be sufficiently 
suggestive to-day. A ceremonial brotherhood- 
in-arms between Father Bernard Vaughan and 
Mr Bernard Shaw seems full of possibilities. 
I am faintly pleased with the fancy of Mr 
Arnold Bennett endeavouring to extract the 
larger humanities of fiction from the political 
differences of Mr Arnold White and Mr Arnold 
Lupton. I should pass my own days in the 
exclusive society of Professor Gilbert Murray 
and Sir Gilbert Parker; whom I can conceive 
as differing on some points from each other, 
and on some points from me. Now there is 
47 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

I 

one odd thing to notice about this old joke; 
that it might have been taken in a more serious 
spirit, though in a saner style, in a yet older 
period. This fantasy of the Victorian Age 
might easily have been a fact of the Middle 
Ages. There would have been nothing ab- 
normal in the moral atmosphere of mediaevalism 
in some feast or pageant celebrating the fellow- 
ship of men who had the same patron saint. 
It seems mad and meaningless now, because 
the meaning of Christian names has been lost. 
They have fallen into a kind of chaos and 
oblivion which is highly typical of our time. 
I mean that there are still fashions in them, but 
no longer reasons for them. For a fashion is 
a custom without a cause. A fashion is a custom 
to which men cannot get accustomed; simply 
because it is without a cause. That is why our 
industrial societies, touching every topic from 
the cosmos to the coat-collars, are merely swept 
by a succession of modes which are merely 
moods. They are customs that fail to be 
customary. And so amid all our fashions in 
48 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

Christian names, we have forgotten all that was 
meant by the custom of Christian names. We 
have forgotten all the original facts about a 
Christian name; but, above all, the fact that it 
was Christian. 

Now if we note this process going on in the 
world of London or Liverpool, we shall see 
that it has already gone even farther and fared 
even worse. The surname also is losing its 
root and therefore its reason. The surname 
has become as solitary as a nickname. For it 
might be argued that the first name is meant 
to be an individual and even isolated thing; 
but the last name is certainly meant, by all logic 
and history, to link a man with his human 
origins, habits, or habitation. Historically, it 
was a word taken from the town he lived in or 
the trade guild to which he belonged; legally 
it is still the word on which all questions 
of legitimacy, succession, and testamentary 
arrangements turn. It is meant to be the 
corporate name; in that sense it is meant to be 
the impersonal name, as the other is meant to 
49 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

be the personal name. Yet in the modern mode 
of industrialism, it is more and more taken in 
a manner at once lonely and light. Any 
corporate social system built upon it would 
seem as much of a joke as the joke about 
Christian names with which I began. If it 
would seem odd to require a Thomas to make 
friends with any other Thomas, it would appear 
almost as perplexing to insist that any Thomp- 
son must love any other Thompson. It may 
be that Sir Edward Henry, late of the Police 
Force, does not wish to be confined to the 
society of Mr Edward Clodd. But would Sir 
Edward Henry necessarily seek the society of 
Mr O. Henry, entertaining as that society 
would be ? Sir John Barker, founder of the 
great Kensington emporium, need not specially 
seek out and embrace Mr John Masefield; 
but need he, any more swiftly, precipitate him- 
self into the arms of Mr Granville Barker ? 
This vista of varieties would lead us far; but 
it is enough to notice, nonsense apart, that the 
most ordinary English surnames have become 
SO 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

unique in their social significance; they stand 
for the man rather than the race or the origins. 
Even when they are most common they are 
not communal. What we call the family name 
is not now primarily the name of the family. 
The family itself, as a corporate conception, has 
already faded into the background, and is 
in danger of fading from the background. In 
short, our Christian names are not the only 
Christian things that we may lose. 

Now the second solid fact which struck me 
in Ireland (after the success of small property 
and the failure of large organisation) was the 
fact that the family was in a flatly contrary 
position. All I have said above, in current 
language, about the whole trend of the modern 
world, is directly opposite to the whole trend 
of the modern Irish world. Not only is the 
Christian name a Christian name; but (what 
seems still more paradoxical and even panto- 
mimic) the family name is really a family name. 
Touching the first of the two, it would be easy 
to trace out some very interesting truths about 
51 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

it, if they did not divert us from the main 
truth of this chapter; the second great truth 
about Ireland. People contrasting the * educa- 
tion ' of the two countries, or seeking to 
extend to the one the thing which is called 
education in the other, might indeed do worse 
than study the simple problem of the meaning 
of Christian names. It might dawn at last, 
even on educationists, that there is a value in 
the content as well as the extent of culture; or 
(in other words), that knowing nine hundred 
words is not always more important than know- 
ing what some of them mean. It is strictly and 
soberly true that any peasant, in a mud cabin 
in County Clare, when he names his child 
Michael, may really have a sense of the presence 
that smote down Satan, the arms and plumage 
of the paladin of paradise. I doubt whether it is 
so overwhelmingly probable that any clerk in 
any villa on Clapham Common, when he names 
his son John, has a vision of the holy eagle of the 
Apocalypse, or even of the mystical cup of the 
disciple whom Jesus loved. In the face of that 
52 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

simple fact, I have no doubt about which is 
the more educated man ; and even a knowledge 
of the Daily Mail does not redress the balance. 
It is often said, and possibly truly, that the 
peasant named Michael cannot write his own 
name. But it is quite equally true that the 
clerk named John cannot read his own name. 
He cannot read it because it is in a foreign 
language, and he has never been made to 
realise what it stands for. He does not know 
that John means John, as the other man does 
know that Michael means Michael. In that 
rigidly realistic sense, the pupil of industrial 
intellectualism does not even know his own 
name. 

But this is a parenthesis ; because the point 
here is that the man in the street (as distinct 
from the man in the field) has been separated 
not only from his private but from his more 
public description. He has not only forgotten 
his name, but forgotten his address. In my 
own view, he is like one of those unfortunate 
people who wake up with their minds a blank, 
53 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

and therefore cannot find their way home. 
But whether or no we take this view of the 
state of things in an industrial society like the 
English, we must realise firmly that a totally 
opposite state of things exists in an agricultural 
society like the Irish. We may put it, if we like, 
in the form of an unfamiliar and even unfriendly 
fancy. We may say that the house is greater 
than the man; that the house is an amiable 
ogre that runs after and recaptures the man. 
But the fact is there, familiar or unfamiliar, 
friendly or unfriendly; and the fact is the 
family. The family pride is prodigious, 
though it generally goes along with glowing 
masses of individual humility. And this family 
sentiment does attach itself to the family name; 
so that the very language in which men think 
is made up of family names. In this the 
atmosphere is singularly unlike that of England 
though much more like that of Scotland. In- 
deed, it will illustrate the impartial recognition 
of this, apart from any partisan deductions, 
that it is equally apparent in the place where 
54 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

Ireland and Scotland are supposed to meet. 
It is equally apparent in Ulster, and even in 
the Protestant corner of Ulster. 

In all the Ulster propaganda I came across, 
I think the thing that struck me most sharply 
was one phrase in one Unionist leading article. 
It was something that might fairly be called 
Scottish; something which was really even 
more Irish ; but something which could not in 
the wildest mood be called English, and there- 
fore could not with any rational meaning be 
called Unionist. Yet it was part of a passion- 
ately sincere, and indeed truly human and 
historic outburst of the politics of the north- 
east corner, against the politics of the rest of 
Ireland. Most of us remember that Sir 
Edward Carson put into the Government a 
legal friend of his named Campbell; it was at 
the beginning of the war, and few of us thought 
anything of the matter except that it was stupid 
to give posts to Carsonites at the most delicate 
crisis of the cause in Ireland. Since then, as 
we also know, the same Campbell has shown 
55 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

himself a sensible man, which I should translate 
as a practical Home Ruler; but which is any- 
how something more than what is generally 
meant by a Carsonite. I entertain, myself, a 
profound suspicion that Carson also would very 
much like to be something more than a Car- 
sonite. But however this may be, his legal 
friend of whom I speak made an excellent 
speech, containing some concession to Irish 
popular sentiment. As might have been 
expected, there were furious denunciations of 
him in the press of the Orange party; but 
not more furious than might have been 
found in the Morning Post or any Tory paper. 
Nevertheless, there was one phrase that I cer- 
tainly never saw in the Morning Post or the 
Saturday Review \ one phrase I should never 
expect to see in any English paper, though I 
might very probably see it in a Scotch paper. 
It was this sentence, that was read to me from 
the leading article of a paper in Belfast ; * There 
never was treason yet but a Campbell was at 
the bottom of it.' I give the extract as it was 

56 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

given to me; I am quite conscious of a curious 
historical paradox about it. A curse against 
Campbells would seem to be a Jacobite rather 
than a Williamite tradition. It may suggest 
interesting complications of Scottish feuds in 
Ireland; but it serves as one of a thousand 
cases of this fact about the family. 

Let anybody imagine an Englishman saying, 
about some business quarrel, *How like an 
Atkins ! ' or * What could you expect of a 
Wilkinson ? ' A moment's reflection will show 
that it would be even more impossible touching 
public men in public quarrels. No English 
Liberal ever connected the earlier exploits of 
the present Lord Birkenhead with atavistic 
influences, or the totem of the wide and wander- 
ing tribe of Smith. No English patriot traced 
back the family tree of any English pacifist; 
or said there was never treason yet but a 
Pringle was at the bottom of it. It is the 
indefinite article that is here the definite dis- 
tinction. It is the expression * a Campbell ' 
which suddenly transforms the scene, and covers 
57 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

the robes of one lawyer with the ten thousand 
tartans of a whole clan. Now that phrase is 
the phrase that meets the traveller everywhere 
in Ireland. Perhaps the next most arresting 
thing I remember, after the agrarian revolu- 
tion, was the way in which one poor Irishman 
happened to speak to me about Sir Roger 
Casement. He did not praise him as a deliverer 
of Ireland; he did not abuse him as a disgrace 
to Ireland; he did not say anything of the 
twenty things one might expect him to say. 
He merely referred to the rumour that Case- 
ment meant to become a Catholic just before 
his execution, and expressed a sort of distant 
interest in it. He added: * He's always been 
a Black Protestant. All the Casements are 
Black Protestants.' I confess that, at that 
moment of that morbid story, there seemed to 
me to be something unearthly about the very 
idea of there being other Casements. If ever 
a man seemed solitary, if ever a man seemed 
unique to the point of being unnatural, it was 
that man on the two or three occasions when 

58 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

I have seen his sombre handsome face and his 
wild eye; a tall, dark figure walking already 
in the shadow of a dreadful doom. I do not 
know if he was a Black Protestant; but he was 
a black something, in the sad if not the bad 
sense of the symbol. I fancy, in truth, he stood 
rather for the third of Browning's famous triad 
of rhyming monosyllables. A distinguished 
Nationalist Member, who happened to have 
had a medical training, said to me, * I was quite 
certain, when I first clapped eyes on him, the 
man was mad.' Anyhow the man was so 
unusual, that it would never have occurred to 
m^e or any of my countrymen to talk as if there 
were a class or clan of such men. I could 
almost have imagined he had been born with- 
out father or mother. But for the Irish, his 
father and mother were really more important 
than he was. There is said to be a historical 
mystery about whether Parnell made a pun 
when he said that the name of Kettle was a 
household word in Ireland. Few symbols 
could now be more contrary than the name of 
I.I, 59 g 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

Kettle and the name of Casement (save for the 
courage they had in common) ; for the younger 
Kettle, who died so gloriously in France, was 
a Nationalist as broad as the other was cramped, 
and as sane as the other was crazy. But if the 
fancy of a punster, following his own delightful 
vein of nonsense, should see something quaint 
in the image of a hundred such Kettles singing 
as he sang by a hundred hearths, a more bitter 
jester, reading that black and obscure story of 
the capture on the coast, might utter a similar 
flippancy about other Casements, opening on the 
foam of such very perilous seas, in a land so 
truly forlorn. But even if we were not annoyed 
at the pun, we should be surprised at the plural. 
And our surprise would be the measure of 
the deepest difference between England and 
Ireland. To express it in the same idle imagery, 
it would be the fact that even a casement is a 
part of a house, as a kettle is a part of a house- 
hold. Every word in Irish is a household word. 
The English would no more have thought 
of a plural for the word Gladstone than for the 
6q 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

word God. They would never have imagined 
Disraeli compassed about with a great cloud of 
Disraelis; it would have seemed to them 
altogether too apocalyptic an exaggeration 
of being on the side of the angels. To this day 
in England, as I have reason to know, it is 
regarded as a rabid and insane form of religious 
persecution to suggest that a Jew very probably 
comes of a Jewish family. In short, the modern 
English, while their rulers are willing to give 
due consideration to Eugenics as a reasonable 
opportunity for various forms of polygamy 
and infanticide, are drifting farther and farther 
from the only consideration of Eugenics that 
could possibly be fit for Christian men, the 
consideration of it as an accomplished fact. 
I have spoken of infanticide; but indeed the 
ethic involved is rather that of parricide and 
matricide. To my own taste, the present 
tendency of social reform would seem to consist 
of destroying all traces of the parents, in order 
to study the heredity of the children. But I do 
not here ask the reader to accept my own tastes 

6i 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

or even opinions about these things; I only 
bear witness to an objective fact about a foreign 
country. It can be summed up by saying that 
Parnell is the Parnell for the English; but a 
Parnell for the Irish. 

This is what I mean when I say that English 
Home Rulers do not know what the Irish mean 
by home. And this is also what I mean when 
I say that the society does not fit into any of 
our social classifications, liberal or conservative. 
To many Radicals this sense of lineage will 
appear rank reactionary aristocracy. And it 
is aristocratic, if we mean by this a pride of 
pedigree; but it is not aristocratic in the prac- 
tical and political sense. Strange as it may 
sound, its practical effect is democratic. It is 
not aristocratic in the sense of creating an 
aristocracy. On the contrary, it is perhaps the 
one force that permanently prevents the 
creation of an aristocracy, in the manner of the 
English squirearchy. The reason of this 
apparent paradox can be put plainly enough in 
one sentence. If you are really concerned about 
62 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

your relations, you have to be concerned about 
your poor relations. You soon discover that 
a considerable number of your second cousins 
exhibit a strong social tendency to be chimney- 
sweeps and tinkers. You soon learn the lesson 
of human equality, if you try honestly and con- 
sistently to learn any other lesson, even the 
lesson of heraldry and genealogy. For good 
or evil, a real working aristocracy has to forget 
about three-quarters of its aristocrats. It has 
to discard the poor who have the genteel blood, 
and welcome the rich who can live the genteel 
life. If a man is interesting because he is a 
McCarthy, it is so far as he is interesting 
because he is a man ; that is, he is interesting 
whether he is a duke or a dustman. But if he 
is interesting because he is Lord FitzArthur 
and lives at FitzArthur House, then he is 
interesting when he has merely bought the 
house, or when he has merely bought the title. 
To maintain a squirearchy it is necessary to 
admire the new squire, and therefore to forget 
the old squire. The sense of family is like a 

63 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

dog and follows the family; the sense of 
aristocracy is like a cat and continues to haunt 
the house. I am not arguing against aristocracy, 
if the English choose to preserve it in England; 
I am only making clear the terms on which 
they hold it, and warning them that a people 
with a strong family sense will not hold it on 
any terms. Aristocracy, as it has flourished in 
England since the Reformation, with not a 
little national glory and commercial success, is 
in its very nature built up of broken and 
desecrated homes. It has to destroy a hundred 
poor relations to keep up a family. It has to 
destroy a hundred families to keep up a class. 
But if this family spirit is incompatible with 
what we mean by aristocracy, it is quite as 
incompatible with three-quarters of what many 
men praise and preach as democracy. The 
whole trend of what has been regarded as Liberal 
legislation in England, necessary or unneces- 
sary, defensible and indefensible, has for good 
or evil been at the expense of the independence 
of the family, especially of the poor family. 

64 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

From the first most reasonable restraints of the 
Factory Acts to the last most maniacal antics of 
interference with other people's nursery games 
or Christmas dinners, the whole process has 
turned sometimes on the pivot of the State, 
more often on the pivot of the employer, but 
never on the pivot of the home. All this may 
be an emancipation; I only point out that 
Ireland really asked for Home Rule chiefly to 
be emancipated from this emancipation. But 
indeed the English politicians, to do them 
justice, show their consciousness of this by the 
increasing number of cases in which the other 
nation is exempted. We may have harried 
this unhappy people with our persecutions; 
but at least we spare them our reforms. We 
have smitten them with plagues; but at least 
we dare not scourge them with our remedies. 
The real case against the Union is not merely 
a case against the Unionists ; it is a far stronger 
case against the Universalists. It is this strange 
and ironic truth ; that a man stands up holding 
a charter of charity and peace for all mankind ; 



THE FAMILY AND THE FEUD 

that he lays down a law of enlightened justice 
for all the nations of the earth ; that he claims 
to behold man from the beginnings of his 
evolution equal, without any difference between 
the most distant creeds and colours; that he 
stands as the orator of the human race, whose 
statute only declares all humanity to be human ; 
and then slightly drops his voice and says, 
* This Act shall not apply to Ireland.' 



66 



CHAPTER IV 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 

My first general and visual impression of the 
green island was that it was not green but 
brown; that it was positively brown with 
khaki. This is one of those experiences that 
cannot be confused with expectations; the sort 
of small thing that is seen but not foreseen in 
the verbal visions of books and newspapers. 
I knew, of course, that we had a garrison in 
Dublin, but I had no notion that it was so 
obvious all over Dublin. I had no notion that 
it had been considered necessary to occupy the 
country in such force, or with so much parade 
of force. And the first thought that flashed 
through my mind found words in the single 
sentence: * How useful these men would have 
been in the breach at St Quentin.* 

For I went to Dublin towards the end of 

69 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 

19 1 8, and not long after those awful days 
which led up to the end of the war, and seemed 
more like the end of the world. There hung 
still in the imagination, as above a void of 
horror, that line that was the last chain of the 
world's chivalry; and the memory of the day 
when it seemed that our name and our great- 
ness and our glory went down before the 
annihilation from the north. Ireland is hardly 
to blame if she has never known how noble an 
England was in peril in that hour; or for what 
beyond any empire we were troubled when, 
under a cloud of thick darkness, we almost felt 
her ancient foundations move upon the floor 
of the sea. But I, as an Englishman, at least 
knew it; and it was for England and not for 
Ireland that I felt this first impatience and 
tragic irony. I had always doubted the military 
policy that culminated in Irish conscription, 
and merely on military grounds. If any policy 
of the English could deserve to be called in the 
proverbial sense Irish, I think it was this one. 
It was wasting troops in Ireland because we 
70 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 

wanted them in France. I had the same purely 
patriotic and even pugnacious sense of annoy- 
ance, mingling with my sense of pathos, in the 
sight of the devastation of the great Dublin 
street, which had been bombarded by the 
British troops during the Easter RebelHon. I 
was bitterly distressed that such a cannonade had 
ever been aimed at the Irish; but even more 
distressed that it had not been aimed at the 
Germans. The question of the necessity of the 
heavy attack, like the question of the necessity 
of the large army of occupation, is of course 
bound up with the history of the Easter 
Rebellion itself. That strange and dramatic 
event, which came quite as unexpectedly to 
NationaHst Ireland as to Unionist England, is 
no part of my own experiences, and I will not 
dogmatise on so dark a problem. But I will say, 
in passing, that I suspect a certain misunder- 
standing of its very nature to be common on 
both sides. Everything seems to point to the 
paradox that the rebels needed the less to be 
conquered, because they were actually aiming 
71 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 

at being conquered, rather than at being con- 
querors. In the moral sense they were most 
certainly heroes, but I doubt if they expected 
to be conquering heroes. They desired to be 
in the Greek and Hteral sense martyrs; they 
wished not so much to win as to witness. They 
thought that nothing but their dead bodies 
could really prove that Ireland was not dead. 
How far this sublime and suicidal ideal was 
really useful in reviving national enthusiasm 
it is for Irishmen to judge; I should have said 
that the enthusiasm was there anyhow. But if 
any such action is based on international hopes, 
as they affect England or a great part of 
America, it seems to me founded on a fallacy 
about the facts. I shall have occasion to note 
many English errors about the Irish; and this 
seems to me a very notable Irish error about 
the English. If we are often utterly mistaken 
about their mentality, they were quite equally 
mistaken about our mistake. And curiously 
enough, they failed through not knowing the 
one compliment that we had really always 
72 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 

paid them. Their act presupposed that Irish 
courage needed proof; and it never did. I 
have heard all the most horrible nonsense 
talked against Ireland before the war; and I 
never heard Englishmen doubt Irish military- 
valour. What they did doubt was Irish political 
sanity. It will be seen at once that the Easter 
action could only disprove the prejudice they 
hadn't got, and actually confirmed the pre- 
judice they had got. The charge against the 
Irishman was not a lack of boldness, but rather 
an excess of it. Men were right in thinking 
him brave, and they could not be more right. 
But they were wrong in thinking him mad, and 
they had an excellent opportunity to be more 
wrong. Then, when the attempt to fight 
against England developed by its own logic into 
a refusal to fight for England, men took away 
the number they first thought of, and were 
irritated into denying what they had originally 
never dreamed of doubting. In any case, this 
was, I think, the temper in which the minority 
of the true Sinn Feiners sought martyrdom, 

73 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 

I for one will never sneer at such a motive; but 
it would hardly have amounted to so great a 
movement but for another force that happened 
to ally itself with them. It is for the sake of 
this that I have here begun with the Easter 
tragedy itself; for with the consideration of 
this we come to the paradox of Irish Labour. 
Some of my remarks on the stability and even 
repose of a peasant society may seem exagger- 
ated in the light of a Labour agitation that 
breaks out in Ireland as elsewhere. But I have 
particular and even personal reasons for regard- 
ing that agitation as the exception that proves 
the rule. It was the background of the peasant 
landscape that made the Dublin strike the 
peculiar sort of drama that it was; and this 
operated in two ways; first, by isolating the 
industrial capitaHst as something exceptional 
and almost fanatical; and second, by re- 
inforcing the proletariat with a vague tradition 
of property. My own sympathies were all 
with Larkin and Connolly as against the late 
Mr Murphy; but it is curious to note that 
74 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 

even Mr Murphy was quite a different kind of 
man from the Lord Something who is the head 
of a commercial combine in England. He was 
much more like some morbid prince of the 
fifteenth century, full of cold anger, not with- 
out perverted piety. But the first few words 
I heard about him in Ireland were full of that 
vast, vague fact which I have tried to put first 
among my impressions. I have called it the 
family; but it covers many cognate things; 
youth and old friendships, not to mention old 
quarrels. It might be more fully defined as 
a realism about origins. The first things I 
heard about Murphy were facts of his forgotten 
youth, or a youth that would in England have 
been forgotten. They were tales about friends 
of his simpler days, with whom he had set out 
to push some more or less sentimental vendetta 
against somebody. Suppose whenever we 
talked of Harrod's Stores we heard first about 
the boyish day-dreams of Harrod. Suppose 
the mention of Bradshaw*s Railway Guide 
brought up tales of feud and first love in the 
I.I. 75 F 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 

early life of Mr Bradshaw, or even of Mrs 
Bradshaw. That is the atmosphere, to be felt 
rather than described, that a stranger in 
Ireland feels around him. English journalism 
and gossip, dealing with English business men, 
are often precise about the present and pro- 
phetic about the future, but seldom communi- 
cative about the past; et four cause. They will 
tell us where the capitalist is going to, as to 
the House of Lords, or to Monte Carlo, or 
inferentially to heaven; but they say as little 
as possible about where he comes from. In 
Ireland a man carries the family mansion 
about with him like a snail; and his father's 
ghost follows him like his shadow. Every- 
thing good and bad that could be said was 
said, not only about Murphy but about 
Murphys. An anecdote of the old Irish Parlia- 
ment describes an orator as gracefully alluding 
to the presence of an opponent's sister in the 
Ladies' Gallery, by praying that wrath over- 
take the whole accursed generation ' from the 
toothless old hag who is grinning in the 

76 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUa 

gallery to the white-livered poltroon who is 
shivering on the floor.* The story is commonly 
told as suggesting the rather wild disunion of 
Irish parties; but it is quite as important a 
suggestion of the union of Irish families. 

As a matter of fact, the great Dublin Strike, 
a conflagration of which the embers were still 
glowing at the time of my visit, involved another 
episode which illustrates once again this re- 
current principle of the reality of the family in 
Ireland. Some EngHsh SociaHsts, it may be 
remembered, moved by an honourable pity for 
the poor families starving during the strike, 
made a proposal for taking the children away 
and feeding them properly in England. I 
should have thought the more natural course 
would have been to give money or food to the 
parents. But the philanthropists, being 
English and being Socialists, probably had a 
trust in what is called organisation and a dis- 
trust of what is called charity. It is supposed 
that charity makes a man dependent; though 
in fact charity makes him independent, as 
77 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 

compared with the dreary dependence usually 
produced by organisation. Charity gives 
property, and therefore liberty. There is 
manifestly much more emancipation in giving 
a beggar a shilling to spend, than in sending 
an official after him to spend it for him. The 
Socialists, however, had placidly arranged for 
the deportation of all the poor children, when 
they found themselves, to their astonishment, 
confronted with the red-hot reality called the 
religion of Ireland. The priests and the 
families of the faithful organised themselves 
for a furious agitation, on the ground that the 
faith would be lost in foreign and heretical 
homes. They were not satisfied with the assur- 
ance, which some of the Socialists earnestly 
offered, that the faith would not be tampered 
with; and, as a matter of clear thinking, I 
think they were quite right. Those who offer 
such a reassurance have never thought about 
what a religion is. They entertain the extra- 
ordinary idea that religion is a topic. They 
think religion is a thing like radishes, which 

78 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 

can be avoided throughout a particular con» 
versation with a particular person, whom the 
mention of a radish may convulse with anger 
or agony. But a religion is simply the world 
a man inhabits. In practice, a Socialist living 
in Liverpool would not know when he was or 
was not tampering with the religion of a child 
born in -Louth. If I were given the complete 
control of an infant Parsee (which is fortunately 
unlikely) I should not have the remotest notion 
of when I was most vitally reflecting on the 
Parsee system. But common sense, and a 
comprehension of the meaning of a coherent 
philosophy, would lead me to suspect that I 
was reflecting on it every other minute. But 
I mention the matter here, not in order to enter 
into any of these disputes, but to give yet 
another example of the way in which the 
essentially domestic organisation of Ireland 
will always rise in rebellion against any other 
organisation. There is something of a parable 
in the tales of the old evictions, in which the 
whole family was besieged and resisted together 
79 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 

and the mothers emptied boiling kettles on the 
besiegers; for any official who interferes with 
them will certainly get into hot water. We 
cannot separate mothers and children in that 
strange land. We can only return to some of 
our older historical methods and massacre 
them together. 

A small incident within my own short 
experience, however, illustrated the main point 
involved here; the sense of a peasant base even 
of the proletarian attack. And this was 
exemplified not in any check to Labour, but 
rather in a success for Labour, in so far as the 
issue of a friendly and informal debate may be 
classed with its more solid successes. The 
business originally began with a sort of loose- 
jointed literary lecture which I gave in the 
Dublin Theatre, in connection with which I 
only mention two incidents in passing, because 
they both struck me as peculiarly native and 
national. One concerned only the title of my 
address, which was * Poetry and Property.* 
An educated English gentleman, who happened 
80 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 

to speak to me before the meeting, said with the 
air of one who foresees that such jokes will be 
the death of him, * Well, I have simply given 
up puzzling about what you can possibly mean, 
by talking about poetry as something to do 
with property.' He probably regarded the 
combination of words as a mere alliterative 
fantasy, - like Peacocks and Paddington, or 
Polygamy and Potatoes; if indeed he did not 
regard it as a mere combination of incompatible 
contrasts, like Popery and Protestants, or 
Patriotism and Politicians. On the same day 
an Irishman of similar social standing remarked 
quite carelessly, * I've just seen your subject 
for to-morrow. I suppose the Socialists will 
reply to you,* or words to that effect. The 
two terms told him at once, not about the 
lecture (which was literary if it was anything), 
but about the whole philosophy underlying 
the lecture; the whole of that philosophy which 
the lumbering elephant called by Mr Shaw the 
Chesterbelloc laboriously toils to explain in 
England, under the ponderous title of 
8i 



THE PARADOX OP LABOUR 

Distributivism. As Mr Hugh Law once said, 
equally truly, about our pitting of patriotism 
against imperialism, * What is a paradox in 
England is a commonplace in Ireland.* My 
actual monologue, however, dealt merely with 
the witness of poetry to a certain dignity in 
man's sense of private possessions, which is 
certainly not either vulgar ostentation or vulgar 
greed. The French poet of the Pleiade remem- 
bers the slates on his own roof almost as if he 
could count them. And Mr W. B. Yeats, in 
the very wildest vision of a loneliness remote 
and irresponsible, is careful to make it clear 
that he knows how many bean-rows make nine. 
Of course there were people of all parties in 
the theatre, wild Sinn Feiners and conventional 
Unionists, but they all listened to my remarks 
as naturally as they might have all listened to 
an equally incompetent lecture on Monkeys 
or on the Mountains of the Moon. There was 
not a word of politics, least of all party politics, 
in that particular speech ; it was concerned with 
a tradition in art, or at the most, in abstract 
82 



THE PARADOX OP LABOUR 

ethics. But the one amusing thing which makes 
me recall the whole incident was this; that 
when I had finished a stalwart, hearty, heavy 
sort of legal gentleman, a well-known Irish 
judge I understand, was kind enough to move 
a vote of thanks to me. And what amused me 
about him was this: that while I (who am a 
Radical, in sympathy with the revolutionary 
legend) had delivered a mild essay on minor 
poets to a placid if bored audience, the judge, 
who was a pillar of the Castle and a Conserva- 
tive sworn to law and order, proceeded with 
the utmost energy and joy to raise a riot. He 
taunted the Sinn Feiners and dared them to 
come out; he trailed his coat if ever a man 
trailed it in this world; he glorified England; 
not the AlHes, but England; splendid England, 
sublime England (all in the broadest brogue), 
just, wise, and merciful England, and so on, 
flourishing what was not even the flag of his 
own country, and a thing that had not the 
remotest connection with the subject in hand, 
any more than the Great Wall of China. I need 
83 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 

not say that the theatre was soon in a roar of 
protests and repartees; which I suppose was 
what he wanted. He was a jolly old gentleman, 
and I liked him. But what interested me about 
him was this ; and it is of some importance in 
the understanding of his nationality. That sort 
of man exists in England; I know and like 
scores of him. Often he is a major; often a 
squire; sometimes a judge; very occasionally 
a dean. Such a man talks the most ridiculous 
reactionary nonsense in an apoplectic fashion 
over his own port wine; and occasionally in a 
somewhat gasping manner at an avowedly 
political meeting. But precisely what the 
English gentleman would not do, and the Irish 
gentleman did do, would be to make a scene 
on a non-political occasion; when all he had 
to do was to move a formal vote of thanks to a 
total stranger, who was talking about Ithaca 
and Innisfree. An English Conservative would 
be less likely to do it than an English Radical. 
The same thing that makes him conventionally 
political would make him conventionally 

84 



THE PARADOX OF LABOTJIl 

non-political. He would hate to make too seri- 
ous a speech on too social an occasion, as he would 
hate to be in morning-dress when every one 
else was in evening dress. And whatever coat 
he wore he certainly would not trail it solely in 
order to make a disturbance, as did that jolly 
Irish judge. He taught me that the Irishman 
is never so Irish as when he is English. He 
was very like some of the Sinn Feiners who 
shouted him down; and he would be pleased 
to know that he helped me to understand them 
with a greater sympathy. 

I have wandered from the subject in speaking 
of this trifle, thinking it worth while to note the 
positive and provocative quality of all Irish 
opinion ; but it was my purpose only to mention 
this small dispute as leading up to another. 
I had some further talk about poetry and 
property with Mr Yeats at the Dublin Arts 
Club; and here again I am tempted to irrele- 
vant but for me interesting matters. For I am 
conscious throughout of saying less than I 
could wish of a thousand things, my omission 

85 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 

of which is not altogether thoughtless, far less 
thankless. There have been and will be better 
sketches than mine of all that attractive society, 
the paradox of an intelligentsia that is intelli- 
gent. I could write a great deal, not only 
about those I value as my own friends, like 
Katherine Tynan or Stephen Gwynn, but about 
men with whom my meeting was all too 
momentary; about the elvish energy conveyed 
by Mr James Stephens ; the social greatness of 
Dr Gogarty, who was like a witty legend of 
the eighteenth century; of the unique uni- 
versalism of A. E., who has something of the 
presence of William Morris, and a more 
transcendental type of the spiritual hospitality 
of Walt Whitman. But I am not in this rough 
sketch trying to tell Irishmen what they know 
already, but trying to tell Englishmen some of 
the large and simple things that they do not 
always know. The large matter concerned here 
is Labour; and I have only paused upon the 
other points because they were the steps which 
accidentally led up to my first meeting with 
86 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 

this great force. And it was none the less a 
fact in support of my argument because it was 
something of a joke against myself. 

On the occasion I have mentioned, a most 
exhilarating evening at the Arts Club, Mr Yeats 
asked me to open a debate at the Abbey 
Theatre, defending property on its more purely 
political side. My opponent was one of the 
ablest of the leaders of Liberty Hall, the 
famous stronghold of Labour politics in Dublin ; 
Mr Johnson, an Englishman like myself, but 
one deservedly popular with the proletarian 
Irish. He made a most admirable speech, to 
which I mean no disparagement when I say 
that I think his personal popularity had even 
more weight than his personal eloquence. My 
own argument was confined to the particular 
value of small property as a weapon of militant 
democracy, and was based on the idea that 
the citizen resisting injustice could find no 
substitute for private property ; for every other 
impersonal power, however democratic in 
theory, must be bureaucratic in form. I said, 

87 



tHE PARADOX OF LABOtfil 

as a flippant figure of speech, that committing 
property to any officials, even guild officials, 
was like having to leave one's legs in the cloak- 
room along with one's stick or umbrella. The 
point is that a man may want his legs at any 
minute, to kick a man or to dance with a lady; 
and recovering them may be postponed by 
any hitch, from the loss of the ticket to the 
criminal flight of the official. So in a social 
crisis, such as a strike, a man must be ready to 
act without officials who may hamper or betray 
him; and I asked whether many more strikes 
would not have been successful, if each striker 
had owned so much as a kitchen garden to help 
him to live. My opponent replied that he had 
always been in favour of such a reserve of 
proletarian property, but preferred it to be 
communal rather than individual; which seems 
to me to leave my argument where it was; for 
what is communal must be official, unless it is 
to be chaotic. Two minor jokes, somewhat at 
my expense, remain in my memory; I appear 
to have caused some amusement by cutting a 
88 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 

pencil with a very large Spanish knife, which 
I value (as it happens) as the gift of an Irish 
priest who is a friend of mine, and which may 
therefore also be regarded as a symbolic weapon, 
a sort of sword of the spirit. Whether the 
audience thought I was about to amputate my 
own legs in illustration of my own metaphor, 
or that I was going to cut Mr Johnson's throat 
in fury at finding no reply to his arguments, 
I do not know. The other thing which struck 
me as funny was an excellent retort by Mr 
Johnson himself, who had said something 
about the waste of property on guns, and who 
interrupted my remark that there would never 
be a good revolution without guns, by humor- 
ously calHng out, * Treason.' As I told him 
afterwards, few scenes would be more artistic 
than that of an Englishman, sent over to recruit 
for the British army, being collared and given 
up to justice (or injustice) by a Pacifist from 
Liberty Hall. But all throughout the proceed- 
ings I was conscious, as I say, of a very real 
popular feeling supporting the mere personality 
89 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUtt 

of my opponent; as in the ovation he received 
before he spoke at all, or the applause given to 
a number of his topical asides, allusions which 
I could not always understand. After the 
meeting a distinguished Southern Unionist, 
who happens to own land outside Dublin, said 
to me, * Of course, Johnson has just had a huge 
success in his work here. Liberty Hall has just 
done something that has really never been done 
before in the whole Trade Union movement. 
He has really managed to start a Trade Union 
for agricultural labourers. I know, because 
Fve had to meet their demands. You know 
how utterly impossible it has always been really 
to found a union of agricultural labourers in 
England.' I did know it; and I also knew 
why it had been possible to found one in 
Ireland. It had been possible for the very 
reason I had been urging all the evening; that 
behind the Irish proletariat there had been the 
tradition of an Irish peasantry. In their 
families, if not in themselves, there had been 
some memory of the personal love of the land. 
90 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 

But it seemed to rne an interesting irony that 
even my own defeat was an example of my own 
doctrine; and that the truth on my side was 
proved by the popularity of the other side. 
The agricultural guild was due to a wind of 
freedom that came into that dark city from very 
distant fields; and the truth that even these 
rolling -stones of homeless proletarianism had 
been so lately loosened from the very roots of 
the mountains. 

In Ireland even the industrialism is not 
industrial. That is what I mean by saying that 
Irish Labour is the exception that proves the 
rule. That is why it does not contradict my 
former generalisation that our capitalist crisis 
is on the English side of the road. The Irish 
agricultural labourers can become guildsmen 
because they would like to become peasants. 
They think of rich and poor in the manner that 
is as old as the world; the manner of Ahab and 
Naboth. It matters little in a peasant society 
whether Ahab takes the vineyard privately as 
Ahab or officially as King of Israel. It will 

I.I. 91 G 



THE PARADOX OF LABOUR 

matter as little in the long run, even in the other 
kind of society, whether Naboth has a wage to 
work in the vineyard, or a vote that is supposed 
in some way to affect the vineyard. What he 
desires to have is the vineyard; and not in 
apologetic cynicism or vulgar evasions that 
business is business, but in thunder, as from a 
secret throne, comes the awful voice out of the 
vineyard; the voice of this manner of man in 
every age and nation : * The Lord forbid that 
I should give the inheritance of my fathers 
unto thee.' 



9a 



CHAPTER V 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

With no desire to decorate my travels with 
too tall a traveller's tale, I must record the fact 
that I found one point upon which all Irishmen 
were agreed. It was the fact that, for some 
reason or other, there had been a very hopeful 
beginning of Irish volunteering at the begin- 
ning of the war; and that, for some reason or 
other, this had failed in the course of the war. 
The reasons alleged differed widely with the 
moods of men ; some had regarded the begin- 
nings with hope and some with suspicion; 
some had lived to regard the failure with a 
bitter pleasure, and some with a generous pain. 
The different factions gave different explana- 
tions of why the thing had stopped ; but they 
all agreed that it had begun. The Sinn Feiner 
said that the people soon found they had been 
95 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

lured into a Saxon trap, set for them by smooth 
subservient Saxons like Mr Devlin and Mr 
Tim Healy. The Belfast citizen suggested 
that the Popish priest had terrorised the 
peasants when they tried to enlist, producing a 
thumbscrew from his pocket and a portable 
rack from his handbag. The Parliamentary 
Nationalist blamed both Sinn Fein and the 
persecution of Sinn Fein. The British Govern- 
ment officials, if they did not exactly blame 
themselves, at least blamed each other. The 
ordinary Southern Unionist (who played many 
parts of a more or less sensible sort, including 
that of a Home Ruler) generally agreed with 
the ordinary Nationalist that the Govern- 
ment's recruiting methods had been as bad as 
its cause was good. But it is manifest that 
multitudes at the beginning of the war thought 
it really had a very good cause ; and, moreover, 
a very good chance. 

The extraordinary story of how that chance 
was lost may find mention on a later page. 
I will begin by touching on the first incident 

96 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

that befell me personally in connection with 
the same enterprise. I went to Ireland at the 
request of Irish friends who were working 
warmly for the Allied cause, and who con- 
ceived (I fear in far too flattering a spirit) that 
I might at least be useful as an Englishman who 
had always sympathised as warmly with the 
Irish cause. I am under no illusions that I 
should ever be efficient at such work in any case ; 
and under the circumstances I had no great 
hopes of doing much, where men like Sir 
Horace Plunkett and Captain Stephen Gwynne, 
far more competent, more self-sacrificing, and 
more well-informed than I, could already do 
comparatively little. It was too late. A 
hundredth part of the brilliant constancy and 
tragic labours of these men might easily, at the 
beginning of the war, have given us a great 
Irish army. I need not explain the motives 
that made me do the little I could do; they 
were the same that at that moment made 
millions of better men do masses of better work. 
Physical accident prevented my being useful 
97 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

in France, and a sort of psychological accident 
seemed to suggest that I might possibly be 
useful in Ireland ; but I did not see myself as 
a very serious figure in either field. Nothing 
could be serious in such a case except perhaps 
a conviction ; and at least my conviction about 
the great war has never wavered by a hair. 
Belenda est- — and it is typical of the power of 
Berlin that one must break off for want of a 
Latin name for it. Being an Englishman, I 
hoped primarily to help England; but not 
being a congenital idiot, I did not primarily 
ask an Irishman to help England. There was 
obviously something much more reasonable to 
ask him to do. I hope I should in any case 
have done my best for my own country. But 
the cause was more than any country; in a 
sense it was too good for any country. The 
Allies were more right than they realised. 
Nay, they hardly had a right to be so right as 
they were. The modern Babylon of capital- 
istic States was hardly worthy to go on such zr 
crusade against the heathen; as perhaps 

98 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

decadent Byzantium was hardly worthy to 
defend the Cross against the Crescent. But 
we are glad that it did defend the Cross against 
the Crescent. Nobody is sorry that Sobieski 
relieved Vienna; nobody wishes that Alfred 
had not won in Wessex. The cause that 
conquered is the only cause that survived. We 
see now that its enemy was not a cause but a 
chaos; and that is what history will say of 
the strange and recent boiling up of barbaric 
imperialism, a whirlpool whose hollow centre 
was Berlin. This is where the extreme Irish 
were really wrong; perhaps really wrong for 
the first time, I entirely sympathise with their 
being in revolt against the British Government. 
I am in revolt in most ways against the British 
Government myself. But politics are a fugitive 
thing in the face of history. Does anybody 
want to be fixed for ever on the wrong side at 
the Battle of Marathon, through a quarrel with 
some Archon whose very name is forgotten ? 
Does anybody want to be remembered as a 
friend of Attila, through a breach of friendship 
99 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

with Aetius ? In any case, it was with a pro- 
found conviction that if Prussia won Europe 
must perish, and that if Europe perished 
England and Ireland must perish together, that 
I went to Dublin in those dark days of the last 
year of the war; and it so happened that the 
first occasion when I was called upon for any 
expression of opinion was at a very pleasant 
luncheon party given to the representatives of 
the British Dominions, who were then on an 
official tour in the country inspecting its 
conditions. What I said is of no importance 
except as leading up to later events ; but it may 
be noted that though I was speaking perhaps 
indirectly to Irishmen, I was speaking directly, 
if not to Englishmen, at least to men in the 
more English tradition of the majority of the 
Colonies. I was speaking, if not to Unionists, 
at least largely to Imperialists. 

Now I have forgotten, I am happy to say, 

the particular speech that I made, but I can 

repeat the upshot of it here, not only as part of 

the argument, but as part of the story. The 

loo 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

line I took generally in Ireland was an appeal 
to the Irish principle, yet the reverse of a mere 
approval of the Irish action, or inaction. It 
postulated that while the English had missed 
a great opportunity of justifying themselves to 
the Irish, the Irish had also missed a similar 
opportunity of justifying themselves to the 
English-. But it specially emphasised this; 
that what had been lost was not primarily a 
justification against England, but a joke 
against England. I pointed out that an Irish- 
man missing a joke against an Englishman was 
a tragedy, like a lost battle. And there was one 
thing, and one thing only, which had stopped 
the Irishman from laughing and saved the 
Englishman from being laughable. The one 
and only thing that rescued England from 
ridicule was Sinn Fein. Or, at any rate, that 
element in Sinn Fein which was pro-German, 
or refused to be anti-German. Nothing imagin- 
able under the stars except a pro-German Irish- 
man could at that moment have saved the face 
of a (very recently) pro-German Englishman. 

lOI 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

The reason for this is obvious enough. 
England in 19 14 encountered or discovered 
a colossal crime of Prussianised Germany. But 
England could not discover the German crimr 
without discovering the English blunder. The 
blunder was, of course, a perfectly plain his- 
torical fact; that England made Prussia. 
England was the historic, highly civilised 
western state, with Roman foundations and 
chivalric memories; Prussia was originally a 
petty and boorish principality used by England 
and Austria in the long struggle against the 
greatness of France. Now in that long struggle 
Ireland had always been on the side of France. 
She had only to go on being on the side of 
France, and the Latin tradition generally, to 
behold her own truth triumph over her own 
enemies. In a word, it was not a question of 
whether Ireland should become anti-German, 
but merely of whether she should continue to 
be anti-German. It was a question of whether 
she should suddenly become pro-German, at 
the moment when most other pro-Germans 
102 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

were discovering that she had been justified all 
along. But England, at the beginning of her 
last and most lamentable quarrel with Ireland, 
was by no means in so strong a controversial 
position. England was right; but she could 
only prove she was right by proving she was 
wrong. In one sense, and with all respect to 
her right action in the matter, she had to be 
ridiculous in order to be right. 

But the joke against the English was even 
more obvious and topical. And as mine was 
only meant for a light speech after a friendly 
lunch, I took the joke in its lightest and most 
fanciful form, and touched chiefly on the fan- 
tastic theory of the Teuton as the master of the 
Celt. For the supreme joke was this ; that the 
Englishman has not only boasted of being an 
Englishman; he has actually boasted of being 
a German. As the modern mind began to 
doubt the superiority of Calvinism to Catholi- 
cism, all English books, papers, and speeches 
were filled more and more with a Teutonism 
which substituted a racial for a religious 
103 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

superiority. It was felt to be a more modern 
and even a more progressive principle of 
distinction, to insist on ethnology rather than 
theology; for ethnology was supposed to be 
a science. Unionism was simply founded 
on Teutonism. Hence the ordinary honest 
patriotic Unionist was in a highly humorous 
fix when he had suddenly to begin denouncing 
Teutonism as mere terrorism. If all superiority 
belonged to the Teuton, the supreme superi- 
ority must clearly belong to the most Teutonic 
Teuton. If I claim the right to kick Mr 
Bernard Shaw on the specific ground that I 
am fatter than he is, it is obvious that I look 
rather a fool if I am suddenly kicked by some- 
body who is fatter still. When the earth shakes 
under the advancing form of one coming 
against me out of the east who is fatter than I 
(for I called upon the Irish imagination to 
embrace so monstrous a vision), it is clear that 
whatever my relations to the rest of the world, 
in my relations to Mr Bernard Shaw I am rather 
at a disadvantage. Mr Shaw, at any rate, is 
1 04 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

rather in a position to make game of mc; of 
which it is not inconceivable that he might 
avail himself. I might have accumulated a vast 
mass of learned sophistries and journalistic 
catchwords, which had always seemed to me to 
justify the connection between waxing fat and 
kicking. I might have proved from history 
that the leaders had always been fat men, Hke 
William the Conqueror, St Thomas Aquinas, 
and Charles Fox. I might have proved from 
physiology that fatness is a proof of the power 
of organic assimilation and digestion ; or from 
comparative zoology that the elephant is the 
wisest of the beasts. In short, I might be able 
to adduce many arguments in favour of my 
position. Only, unfortunately, they would 
now all become arguments against my position. 
Everything I had ever urged against my old 
enemy could be urged much more forcibly 
against me by my new enemy. And my 
position touching the great adipose theory 
would be exactly like England's position touch- 
ing the equally sensible Teutonic theory. If 
loi 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

Teutonism was creative culture, then on our 
own showing the German was better than the 
EngHshman. If Teutonism was barbarism, 
then on our own showing the Englishman was 
more barbaric than the Irishman. The real 
answer, of course, is that we were not Teutons 
but only the dupes of Teutonism; but some 
were so wholly duped that they would do any- 
thing rather than own themselves dupes. These 
unfortunates, while they are already ashamed of 
being Teutons, are still proud of not being 
Celts. 

There is only one thing that could save my 
dignity in such an undignified ^x as I have 
fancied here. It is that Mr Bernard Shaw 
himself should come to my rescue. It is that 
Mr Bernard Shaw himself should declare in 
favour of the corpulent conqueror from the 
east; that he should take seriously all the fads 
and fallacies of that fat-headed superman. 
That, and that alone, would ensure all my own 
fads and fallacies being not only forgotten but 
forgiven. There is present to my imagination, 
io6 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

I regret to say, a wild possibility that this is 
what Mr Bernard Shaw might really do. Any- 
how, this is what a certain number of his 
countrymen really did. It will be apparent, 
I think, from these pages that I do not believe 
in the stage Irishman. I am under no delusion 
that the Irishman is soft-headed and senti- 
mental,, or even illogical and inconsequent. 
Nine times out of ten the Irishman is not only 
more clear-headed, but even more cool-headed 
than the Englishman. But I think it is true, 
as Mr Max Beerbohm once suggested to me 
in connection with Mr Shaw himself, that there 
is a residual perversity in the Irishman, which 
comes after and not before the analysis of a 
question. There is at the last moment a cold 
impatience in the intellect, an irony which 
returns on itself and rends itself; the subtlety 
of a suicide. However this may be, some of 
the lean men, instead of making a fool of the 
fat man, did begin almost to make a hero of 
the fatter man; to admire his vast curves as 
almost cosmic Hnes of development. I have 

I.I. 107 H 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

seen Irish-American pamphlets which took 
quite seriously (or, I prefer to think, pretended 
to take quite seriously) the ridiculous romance 
about the Teutonic tribes having revived and 
refreshed civilisation after the fall of the 
Roman Empire. They revived civilisation 
very much as they restored Louvain or recon- 
structed the Lusitania. It was a romance which 
the EngUsh for a short time adopted as a 
convenience, but from which the Irish have 
continually suffered as from a curse. It was a 
suicidal perversity that they themselves, in 
their turn, should perpetuate their permanent 
curse as a temporary convenience. That was 
the worst error of the Irish, or of some of the 
best of the Irish. That is why the Easter 
Rising was really a black and insane blunder. 
It was not because it involved the Irish in a 
military defeat; it was because it lost the Irish 
a great controversial victory. The rebel 
deliberately let the tyrant out of a trap; out of 
the grinning jaws of the gigantic trap of a 

joke. 

io8 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

Many of the most extreme Nationalists knew 
this well; it was what Kettle probably meant 
when he suggested an Anglo-Irish history 
called * The Two Fools *; and of course I do 
not mean that I said all this in my very casual 
and rambling speech. But it was based on 
this idea, that men had missed the joke against 
England, and that now unfortunately the joke 
was rather against Ireland. It was Ireland that 
was now missing a great historical opportunity 
for lack of humour and imagination, as England 
had missed it a moment before. If the Irish 
would laugh at the English and help the 
English, they would win all along the line. In 
the real history of the German problem, they 
would inherit all the advantages of having been 
right from the first. It was now not so much 
a question of Ireland consenting to follow 
England's lead as of England being obliged to 
follow Ireland's lead. These are the principles 
which I thought, and still think, the only 
possible principles to form the basis of a 
recruiting appeal in Ireland. But on the 
109 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

particular occasion in question I naturally took 
the matter much more lightly, hoping that the 
two jokes might, as it were, cancel out ard 
leave the two countries quits and in a better 
humour. And I devoted nearly all my remarks 
to testifying that the English had really, in the 
mass, shed the cruder Teutonism that had 
excused the cruelties of the past. I said that 
Englishmen were anything but proud of the 
past government of Ireland; that the mass of 
men of all parties were far more modest and 
humane in their view of Ireland than most 
Irishmen seem to suppose. And I ended with 
words which I only quote here from memory, 
because they happen to be the text of the 
curious incident which followed : * This is no 
place for us to boast. We stand here in the 
valley of our humiliation, where the flag we 
love has done very little that was not evil, and 
where its victories have been far more dis- 
astrous than defeats.* And I concluded with 
some general expression of the hope (which 
I still entertain) that two lands so much loved, 
no 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

by those who know them best, are not meant 
to hate each other for ever. 

A day or two afterwards a distinguished 
historian who is a professor at Trinity College, 
Mr Alison Phillips, wrote an indignant letter 
to the Irish Times, He announced that he was 
not in the valley of humiliation, and warmly 
contradicted the report that he was, as he 
expressed it, * sitting in sackcloth and ashes.* 
He remarked, if I remember right, that I was 
middle-class, which is profoundly true; and 
he generally resented my suggestions as a 
shameful attack upon my fellow Englishmen. 
This both amused and puzzled me; for of 
course I had not been attacking Englishmen, 
but defending them; I had merely been assur- 
ing the Irish that the English were not so 
black, or so red, as they were painted in the 
vision of * England's cruel red.* I had not 
said there what I have said here, about the 
anomaly and absurdity of England in Ireland; 
I had only said that Ireland had suffered rather 
from the Teutonic theory than the English 
III 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

temper; and that the English temper, experi- 
enced at close quarters, was really quite ready 
for a reconciliation with Ireland. Nor indeed 
did Mr Alison Phillips really complain es- 
pecially of my denouncing the English, but 
rather of my way of defending them. He did 
not so much mind being charged with the vice 
of arrogance. What he could not bear was 
being charged with the virtue of humility. 
What worried him was not so much the supposi- 
tion of our doing wrong, as that anybody should 
conceive it possible that we were sorry for doing 
wrong. After all, he probably reasoned, it may 
not be easy for an eminent historical scholar 
actually to deny that certain tortures have taken 
place, or certain perjuries been proved; but 
there is really no reason why he should admit 
that the memory of using torture or perjury 
has so morbid an effect on the mind. There- 
fore he naturally desired to correct any impres- 
sion that might arise, to the effect that he had 
been seen in the valley of humiliation, like a 
man called Christian. 

112 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

But there was one fancy that lingered in the 
mind over and above the fun of the thing; and 
threw a sort of random ray of conjecture upon 
all that long international misunderstanding 
which it is so hard to understand. Was it 
possible, I thought, that this had happened 
before, and that I was caught in the treadmill 
of recurrence ? It may be that whenever, 
throughout the centuries, a roughly representa- 
tive and fairly good-humoured Englishman has 
spoken to the Irish as thousands of such 
Englishmen feel about them, some other 
Englishman on the spot has hastened to explain 
that the English are not going in for sackcloth 
and ashes, but only for phylacteries and the 
blowing of their own trumpets before them. 
Perhaps whenever one Englishman said that 
the English were not so black as they were 
painted in the past, another Englishman always 
rushed forward to prove that the English were 
not so white as they were painted on the present 
occasion. And after all it was only English- 
man against Englishman, one word against 
113 



THE ENGLISHMAN IN IRELAND 

another; and there were many superiorities on 
the side which refused to believe in English 
sympathy or self-criticism. And very few of 
the Irish, I fear, understood the simple fact of 
the matter, or the real spiritual excuses of the 
party thus praising spiritual pride. Few under- 
stood that I represented large numbers of 
amiable Englishmen in England, while Mr 
Phillips necessarily represented a small number 
of naturally irritable Englishmen in Ireland. 
Few, I fancy, sympathised with him so much 
as I do; for I know very well that he was not 
merely feeling as an Englishman, but as an 
exile. 



114 



CHAPTER VI 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

I MET one hearty Unionist, not to say Coercion- 
ist in Ireland, in such a manner as to talk to 
him at some length; one quite genial and 
genuine Irish gentleman, who was solidly on 
the side of the system of British government in 
Ireland. This gentleman had been shot 
through the body by the British troops in their 
efforts to suppress the Easter Rebellion. The 
matter just missed being tragic; but since it 
did, I cannot help feeling it as slightly comic. 
He assured me with great earnestness that the 
rebels had been guilty of the most calculated 
cruelties, and that they must have done their 
bloody deeds in the coldest blood. But since 
he is himself a solid and (I am happy to -say) a 
living demonstration that the firing even on 
his own side must have been rather wild, I am 
117 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

inclined to give the benefit of the doubt also 
to the less elaborately educated marksmen. 
When disciplined troops destroy people so 
much at random, it would seem unreasonable 
to deny that rioters may possibly have been 
riotous. I hardly think he was, or even pro- 
fessed to be, a person of judicial impartiality; 
and it is entirely to his honour that he was, on 
principle, so much more indignant with the 
rioters who did not shoot him than with the 
other rioters who did. But I venture to intro- 
duce him here not so much as an individual 
as an allegory. The incident seems to me to 
set forth, in a pointed, lucid, and picturesque 
form, exactly what the British military govern- 
ment really succeeded in doing in Ireland. It 
succeeded in half-killing its friends, and 
affording an intelligent but somewhat inhumane 
amusement to all its enemies. The fire-eater 
held his fire-arm in so contorted a posture 
as to give the wondering spectator a simple 
impression of suicide. 

Let it be understood that I speak here, not 
ii8 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

of tyranny thwarting Irish desires, but solely 
of our own stupidity in thwarting our own 
desires. I shall discuss elsewhere the alleged 
presence or absence of practical oppression in 
Ireland; here I am only continuing from the 
last chapter my experiences of the recruiting 
campaign. I am concerned now, as I was 
concerned then, with the simple business 
matter of getting a big levy of soldiers from 
Ireland. I think it was Sir Francis Vane, one 
of the few really valuable public servants in the 
matter (I need not say he was dismissed for 
having been proved right) who said that the 
mere sight of some representative Belgian 
priests and nuns might have produced some- 
thing like a crusade. The matter seems to 
have been mostly left to elderly English land- 
lords; and it would be cruel to record their 
adventures. It will be enough that I heard, on 
excellent testimony, that these unhappy gentle- 
men had displayed throughout Ireland a poster 
consisting only of the Union Jack and the 
appeal, * Is not this your flag ? Come and 
119 



THE MISTAKE OF ENCxLAND 

fight for it! ' It faintly recalls something we 
all learnt in the Latin grammar about questions 
that expect the answer no. These remarkable 
recruiting-sergeants did not realise, I suppose, 
what an extraordinary thing this was, not 
merely in Irish opinion, but generally in 
international opinion. Over a great part of the 
globe, it would sound like a story that the Turks 
had placarded Armenia with the Crescent of 
Islam, and asked all the Christians who were 
not yet massacred whether they did not love 
the flag. I really do not believe that the Turks 
would be so stupid as to do it. Of course it 
may be said that such an impression or associa- 
tion is mere slander and sedition, that there is 
no reason to be tender to such treasonable 
emotions at all, that men ought to do their 
duty to that flag whatever is put upon that 
poster; in short, that it is the duty of an 
Irishman to be a patriotic Englishman, or 
whatever it is that he is expected to be. But 
this view, however logical and clear, can only 
be used logically and clearly as an argument 

I20 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

for conscription. It is simply muddle-headed 
to apply it to any appeal for volunteers any- 
where, in Ireland or England. The whole 
object of a recruiting poster, or any poster, is 
to be attractive; it is picked out in words or 
colours to be picturesquely and pointedly 
attractive. If it lowers you to make an attrac- 
tive offer, do not make it; but do not deliber- 
ately make it, and deliberately make it repulsive. 
If a certain medicine is so mortally necessary 
and so mortally nasty, that it must be forced 
on everybody by the policeman, call the 
policeman. But do not call an advertisement 
agent to push it like a patent medicine, solely 
by means of * pubHcity * and * suggestion,' and 
then confine him strictly to telling the public 
how nasty it is. 

But the British blunder in Ireland was a 
much deeper and more destructive thing. It 
can be summed up in one sentence; that 
whether or no we were as black as we were 
painted, we actually painted ourselves much 
blacker than we were. Bad as we were, we 

121 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

managed to -look much worse than we were. 
In a horrible unconsciousness we re-enacted 
history through sheer ignorance of history. 
We were foolish enough to dress up, and to 
play up, to the part of a villain in a very old 
tragedy. We clothed ourselves almost care- 
lessly in fire and sword; and if the fire had been 
literally stage-fire or the sword a wooden sword, 
the merely artistic blunder would have been 
quite as bad. For instance, I soon came on the 
traces of a quarrel about some silly veto in the 
schools, against Irish children wearing green 
rosettes. Anybody with a streak of historical 
imagination would have avoided a quarrel in 
that particular case about that particular colour. 
It is touching the talisman, it is naming the 
name, it is striking the note of another relation 
in which we were in the wrong, to the confusion 
of a new relation in which we were in the 
right. Anybody of common sense, considering 
any other case, can see the almost magic force 
of these material coincidences. If the English 
armies in France in 19 14 considered themselves 
122 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

justified for some reason in executing some 
Frenchwoman, they would perhaps be indis- 
creet if they killed her (however logically) tied 
to a stake in the market-place of Rouen. If 
the people of Paris rose in the most righteous 
revolt against the most corrupt conspiracy of 
some group of the wealthy French Protestants, 
I should strongly advise them not to fix the 
date for the vigil of St Bartholomew, or to go 
to work with white scarfs tied round their 
arms. Many of us hope to see a Jewish 
commonwealth reconstituted in Palestine; and 
we could easily imagine some quarrel in which 
the government of Jerusalem was impelled to 
punish some Greek or Latin pilgrim or monk. 
The Jews might even be right in the quarrel 
and the Christian wrong. But it may be 
hinted that the Jews would be ill-advised if 
they actually crowned him with thorns, and 
killed him on a hill just outside Jerusalem. 
Now we must know by this time, or the sooner 
we know it the better, that the whole mind of 
that European society which we have helped 
M. 1^3 I 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

to save, and in which we have henceforth a 
part right of control, regards the Anglo-Irish 
story as one of those black and white stories in 
a history book. It sees the tragedy of Ireland 
as simply and clearly as the tragedy of Christ 
or Joan of Arc. There may have been more to 
be said on the coercive side than the culture of 
the Continent understands. So there was a 
great deal more than is usually admitted to be 
said on the side of the patriotic democracy which 
condemned Socrates; and a very great deal 
to be said on the side of the imperial aris- 
tocracy which would have crushed Washington. 
But these disputes will not take Socrates from 
his niche among the pagan saints, or Washing- 
ton from his pedestal among the republican 
heroes. After a certain testing time substan- 
tial justice is always done to the men who stood 
in some unmistakable manner for liberty and 
light against contemporary caprice and fashion- 
able force and brutality. In this intellectual 
sense, in the only competent intellectual courts, 
there is already justice to Ireland. In the wide 
124 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

daylight of this world-wide fact we or our 
representatives must get into a quarrel with 
children, of all people, and about the colour 
green, of all things in the world. It is an 
exact working model of the mistake I mean. 
It is the more brutal because it is not strictly 
cruel; and yet instantly revives the memories 
of cruelty. There need be nothing wrong 
with it in the abstract, or in a less tragic 
atmosphere where the symbols were not 
talismans. A schoolmaster in the prosperous 
and enlightened town of Eatanswill might 
not unpardonably protest against the school- 
children parading in class the Buff and Blue 
favours of Mr Fizkin and Mr Slumkey. 
But who but a madman would not see that to 
say that word, or make that sign, in Ireland, 
was like giving a signal for keening and the 
lament over lost justice that is lifted in the 
burden of the noblest of national songs ; that 
to point to that rag of that colour was to bring 
back all the responsibilities and realities of that 
reign of terror when we were, quite literally, 
125 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

hanging men and women too for wearing of 
the green ? We were not literally hanging 
these children. As a matter of mere utility, 
we should have been more sensible if we had 
been. 

But the same fact took an even more fan- 
tastic form. We not only dressed up as our 
ancestors, but we actually dressed up as our 
enemies. I need hardly state my own convic- 
tion that the Pacifist trick of lumping the 
abuses of one side along with the abominations 
of the other was a shallow pedantry come of 
sheer ignorance of the history of Europe and 
the barbarians. It was quite false that the 
English evil was exactly the same as the 
German. It was quite false; but the English 
in Ireland laboured long and devotedly to 
prove it was quite true. They were not con- 
tent with borrowing old uniforms from the 
Hessians of 1798; they borrowed the newest 
and neatest uniforms from the Prussians of 
1 9 14. I will give only one story that I was 
told, out of many, to show what I mean. There 
126 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

was a sort of village musical festival at a place 
called Cullen in County Cork, at which there 
were naturally national songs and very possibly 
national speeches. That there was a sort of 
social atmosphere, which its critics would call 
Sinn Fein, is exceedingly likely; for that now 
exists all over Ireland, and especially that part 
of Ireland. If we wish to prevent it being 
expressed at all, we must not only forbid all 
public meetings but all private meetings, and 
even the meeting of husband and wife in their 
own house. Still there might have been a case, 
on coercionist lines, for forbidding this public 
meeting. There might be a case, on coercion- 
ist lines, for imprisoning all the people who 
attended it ; or a still clearer case, on those lines, 
for imprisoning all the people in Ireland. But 
the coercionist authorities did not merely forbid 
the meeting, which would mean something. 
They did not arrest the people at the meeting, 
which would mean something. They did not 
blow the whole meeting to hell with big guns, 
which would also mean something. What they 
127 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

did apparently was this. They caused a military 
aeroplane to jerk itself backwards and forwards 
in a staggering fashion just over the heads of 
the people, making as much noise as possible 
to drown the music, and dropping flare rockets 
and fire in various somewhat dangerous forms 
in the neighbourhood of any men, women, and 
children who happened to be listening to the 
music. The reader will note with what ex- 
quisite art, and fine fastidious selection, the 
strategist has here contrived to look as Prussian 
as possible without securing any of the advan- 
tages of Prussianism. I do not know exactly 
how much danger there was, but there must 
have been some. Perhaps about as much as 
there generally has been when boys have been 
flogged for playing the fool with fireworks. But 
by laboriously climbing hundreds of feet into 
the air, in an enormous military machine, these 
ingenuous people managed to make them- 
selves a meteor in heaven and a spectacle to all 
the earth; the English raining fire on women 
and children just as the Germans did. I repeat 
128 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

that they did not actually destroy children, 
though they did endanger them; for playing 
with fireworks is always playing with fire. 
And I repeat that, as a mere matter of business, 
it would have been more sensible if they had 
destroyed children. That would at least have 
had the human meaning that has run through 
a hundred massacres : * wolf-cubs who would 
grow into wolves.* It might at least have the 
execrable excuse of decreasing the number of 
rebels. What they did would quite certainly 
increase it. 

An artless Member of Parliament, whose 
name I forget, attempted an apology for this 
half-witted performance. He interposed in the 
Unionist interests, when the Nationalists were 
asking questions about the matter, and said 
with much heat, * May I ask whether honest 
and loyal subjects have anything to fear from 
British aeroplanes ? ' I have often wondered 
what he meant. It seems possible that he was 
in the mood of that mediaeval fanatic who 
cried, * God will know his own '; and that he 
129 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

himself would fling any sort of flaming bolts 
about anywhere, believing that they would 
always be miraculously directed towards the 
heads harbouring, at that moment, the most 
incorrect political opinions. Or perhaps he 
meant that loyal subjects are so superbly loyal 
that they do not mind being accidentally burnt 
alive, so long as they are assured that the fire 
was dropped on them by Government officials 
out of a Government apparatus. But my pur- 
pose here is not to fathom such a mystery, but 
merely to fix the dominant fact of the whole 
situation; that the Government copied the 
theatricality of Potsdam even more than the 
tyranny of Potsdam. In that incident the 
English laboriously reproduced all the artificial 
accessories of the most notorious crimes of 
Germany; the flying men, the flame, the selec- 
tion of a mixed crowd, the selection of a popular 
festival. They had every part of it, except the 
point of it. It was as if the whole British army 
in Ireland had dressed up in spiked helmets 
and spectacles, merely that they might /ook like 
130 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

Prussians. It was even more as if a man had 
walked across Ireland on three gigantic stilts, 
taller than the trees and visible from the most 
distant village, solely that he might look like 
one of those unhuman monsters from Mars, 
striding about on their iron tripods in the great 
nightmare of Mr Wells. Such was our educa- 
tional efficiency that, before the end, multi- 
tudes of simple Irish people really had about 
the English invasion the same particular psycho- 
logical reaction that multitudes of simple 
English people had about the German invasion. 
I mean that it seemed to come not only from 
outside the nation, but from outside the 
world. It was unearthly in the strict sense in 
which a comet is unearthly. It was the more 
appallingly alien for coming close; it was the 
more outlandish the farther it went inland. 
These Christian peasants have seen coming 
westward out of England what we saw coming 
westward out of Germany. They saw science 
in arms; which turns the very heavens into 
hells. 

131 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

I have purposely put these fragmentary and 
secondary impressions before any general sur- 
vey of Anglo-Irish policy in the war. I do so, 
first because I think a record of the real things, 
that seemed to bulk biggest to any real 
observer at any real moment, is often more 
useful than the setting forth of theories he may 
have made up before he saw any realities at 
all. But I do it in the second place because the 
more general summaries of our statesmanship, 
or lack of statesmanship, are so much more 
likely to be found elsewhere. But if we wish 
to comprehend the queer cross-purposes, it 
will be well to keep always in mind a historical 
fact I have mentioned already; the reality of 
the old Franco-Irish Entente. It lingers alive 
in Ireland, and especially the most Irish parts 
of Ireland. In the fiercely Fenian city of Cork, 
walking round the Young Ireland monument 
that seems to give revolt the majesty of an 
institution, a man told me that German bands 
had been hooted and pelted in those streets 
out of an indignant memory of 1 870. And an 
132 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

eminent scholar in the same town, referring 
to the events of the same * terrible year/ said 
to me : * In 1870 Ireland sympathised with 
France and England with Germany; and, as 
usual, Ireland was right! ' But if they were 
right when we were wrong, they only began to 
be wrong when we were right. A sort of play 
or parable might be written to show that this 
apparent paradox is a very genuine piece of 
human psychology. Suppose there are two 
partners named John and James; that James 
has always been urging the establishment of a 
branch of the business in Paris. Long ago 
John quarrelled with this furiously as a foreign 
fad; but he has since forgotten all about it; 
for the letters from James bored him so much 
that he has not opened any of them for years. 
One fine day John, finding himself in Paris, 
conceives the original idea of a Paris branch; 
but he is conscious in a confused way of having 
quarrelled with his partner, and vaguely feels 
that his partner would be an obstacle to any- 
thing. John remembers that James was always 
133 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

cantankerous, and forgets that he was can- 
tankerous in favour of this project, and not 
against it. John therefore sends James a tele- 
gram, of a brevity amounting to brutaUty, 
simply telling him to come in with no nonsense 
about it; and when he has no instant reply, 
sends a solicitor's letter to be followed by a 
writ. How James will take it depends very 
much on James. How he will hail this happy 
confirmation of his own early opinions will 
depend on whether James is an unusually 
patient and charitable person. And James is 
not. He is unfortunately the very man, of all 
men in the world, to drop his own original 
agreement and everything else into the black 
abyss of disdain, which now divides him from 
the man who has the impudence to agree with 
him. He is the very man to say he will have 
nothing to do with his own original notion, 
because it is now the belated notion of a fool. 
Such a character could easily be analysed in 
any good novel. Such conduct would readily 
be believed in any good play. It could not be 
134 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

believed when it happened in real life. And 
it did happen in real life; the Paris project was 
the sense of the safety of Paris as the pivot 
of human history ; the abrupt telegram was 
the recruiting campaign, and the writ was 
conscription. 

As to what Irish conscription was, or rather 
would have been, I cannot understand any 
visitor in Ireland having the faintest doubt, 
unless (as is often the case) his tour was so 
carefully planned as to permit him to visit 
everything in Ireland except the Irish. Irish 
conscription was a piece of rank raving madness, 
which was fortunately stopped, with other bad 
things, by the blow of Foch at the second 
battle of the Marne. It could not possibly 
produce at the last moment allies on whom we 
could depend; and it would have lost us the 
whole sympathy of the allies on whom we at 
that moment depended. I do not mean that 
American soldiers would have mutinied; 
though Irish soldiers might have done so; I 
mean something much worse. I mean that the 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

whole mood of America would have altered; 
and there would have been some kind of com- 
promise with German tyranny, in sheer disgust 
at a long exhibition of English tyranny. Things 
would have happened in Ireland, week after 
week, and month after month, such as the 
modern imagination has not seen except where 
Prussia has established hell. We should have 
butchered women and children; they would 
have made us butcher them^ We should have 
killed priests, and probably the best priests. 
It could not be better stated than in the words 
of an Irishman, as he stood with me in a high 
terraced garden outside Dublin, looking to- 
wards that unhappy city, who shook his head 
and said sadly, * They will shoot the wrong 
bishop.* 

Of the meaning of this huge furnace of de- 
fiance I shall write when I write of the national 
idea itself. I am concerned here not for their 
nation but for mine; and especially for its 
peril from Prussia and its help from America. 
And it is simply a question of considering what 
136 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

these real things are really like. Remember 
that the American Republic is practically 
founded on the fact, or fancy, that England is 
a tyrant. Remember that it was being cease- 
lessly swept with new waves of immigrant 
Irishry telling tales (too many of them true, 
though not all) of the particular cases in which 
England- had been a tyrant. It would be hard 
to find a parallel to explain to Englishmen the 
effect of awakening traditions so truly American 
by a prolonged display of England as the 
tyrant in Ireland. A faint approximation might 
be found if we imagined the survivors of 
Victorian England, steeped in the tradition of 
Uncle Toms Cahin^ watching the American 
troops march through London. Suppose they 
noted that the negro troops alone had to march 
in chains, with a white man in a broad-brimmed 
hat walking beside them and flourishing a whip. 
Scenes far worse than that would have followed 
Irish conscription; but the only purpose of 
this chapter is to show that scenes quite as 
stupid marked every stage of Irish recruitment. 
137 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

For it certainly would not have reassured the 
traditional sympathisers with Uncle Tom to 
be told that the chains were only a part of the 
uniform, or that the niggers moved not at the 
touch of the whip, but only at the crack of it. 
Such was our practical policy; and the single 
and sufficient comment on it can be found in 
a horrible whisper which can scarcely now be 
stilled. It is said, with a dreadful plausibility, 
that the Unionists were deliberately trying to 
prevent a large Irish recruitment, which would 
certainly have meant reconciliation and reform. 
In plain words, it is said that they were willing 
to be traitors to England, if they could only 
still be tyrants to Ireland. Only too many 
facts can be made to fit in with this; but for 
me it is still too hideous to be easily believed. 
But whatever our motives in doing it, there is 
simply no doubt whatever about what we did, 
in this matter of the Pro-Germans in Ireland. 
We did not crush the Pro-Germans; we did 
not convert them, or coerce them, or educate 
them or exterminate them or massacre them. 

138 



THE MISTAKE OE ENGLAND 

We manufactured them; we turned them out 
patiently, steadily, and systematically as if from 
a factory; we made them exactly as we made 
munitions. It needed no little social science 
to produce, in any kind of Irishman, any kind 
of sympathy with Prussia; but we were equal 
to the task. What concerns me here, how- 
ever, is that we were busy at the same work 
among the Irish-Americans, and ultimately 
among all the Americans. And that would 
have meant, as I have already noted, the thing 
that I always feared ; the dilution of the policy 
of the Allies. Anything that looked like a pro- 
longed Prussianism in Ireland would have 
meant a compromise; that is, a perpetuated 
Prussianism in Europe. I know that some 
who agree with me in other matters disagree 
with me in this ; but I should indeed be ashamed 
if, having to say so often where I think my 
country was wrong, I did not say as plainly 
where I think she was right. The notion of 
a compromise was founded on the coincidence 
of recent national wars, which were only about 
I.I. 139 K 



THE MISTAKE OF ENGLAND 

the terms of peace, not about the type of 
civilisation. But there do recur, at longer 
historic intervals, universal wars of religion, 
not concerned with what one nation shall do, 
but with what all nations shall be. They 
recommence until they are finished, in things 
like the fall of Carthage or the rout of Attila. 
It is quite true that history is for the most part 
a plain road, which the tribes of men must 
travel side by side, bargaining at the same 
markets or worshipping at the same shrines, 
fighting and making friends again ; and wisely 
making friends quickly. But we need only 
see the road stretch but a little farther, from a 
hill but a little higher, to see that sooner or 
later the road comes always to another place, 
where stands a winged image of victory; and 
the ways divide. 



140 



CHAPTER VII 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

There is one phrase which certain Irishmen 
sometimes use in conversation, which indicates 
the real mistake that they sometimes make in 
controversy. When the more bitter sort of 
Irishman is at last convinced of the existence 
of the less bitter sort of Englishman, who does 
realise that he ought not to rule a Christian 
people by alternations of broken heads and 
broken promises, the Irishman has sometimes 
a way of saying, * I am sure you must have 
Irish blood in your veins.' Several people told 
me so when I denounced Irish conscription, 
a thing ruinous to the whole cause of the 
Alliance. Some told me so even when I re- 
called the vile story of '98 ; a thing damned by 
the whole opinion of the world. I assured them 
in vain that I did not need to have Irish blood 

143 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

in my veins, in order to object to having Irish 
blood on my hands. So far as I know, I have 
not one single drop of Irish blood in my veins. 
I have some Scottish blood; and some which, 
judging merely by a name in the family, must 
once have been French blood. But the 
determining part of it is purely English, and 
I believe East Anglian, at the flattest and 
farthest extreme from the Celtic fringe. But 
I am here concerned, not with whether it is true, 
but with why they should want to prove it is 
true. One would think they would want to 
prove precisely the opposite. Even if they were 
exaggerative and unscrupulous, they should 
surely seek to show that an Englishman was 
forced to condemn England, rather than that 
an Irishman was incHned to support Ireland. 
As it is, they are labouring to destroy the 
impartiaUty and even the independence of their 
own witness. It does not support, but rather 
surrender Irish rights, to say that only the 
Irish can see that there are Irish wrongs. It 
is confessing that Ireland is a Celtic dream and 
144 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

delusion, a cloud of sunset mistaken for an 
island. It is admitting that such a nation is 
only a notion, and a nonsensical notion; but 
in reality it is this notion about Irish blood 
that is nonsensical. Ireland is not an illusion; 
and her wrongs are not the subjective fancies 
of the Irish. Irishmen did not dream that they 
were evicted out of house and home by the 
ruthless application of a land law no man now 
dares to defend. It was not a nightmare that 
dragged them from their beds; nor were they 
sleepwalkers when they wandered as far as 
America. Skeffington did not have a delusion 
that he was being shot for keeping the peace; 
the shooting was objective, as the Prussian 
professors would say; as objective as the 
Prussian militarists could desire. The delusions 
were admittedly peculiar to the British official 
whom the British Government selected to 
direct operations on so important an occasion. 
I could understand it if the Imperialists took 
refuge in the Celtic cloud, conceived Colthurst 
as full of a mystic frenzy like the chieftain who 
H5 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

fought with the sea, pleaded that Piggott was 
a poet whose pen ran away with him, or that 
Sergeant Sheridan romanced like a real stage 
Irishman. I could understand it if they de- 
clared that it was merely in the elvish ecstasy 
described by Mr Yeats that Sir Edward 
Carson, that famous First Lord of the Admiralty, 
rode on the top of the dishevelled wave; and 
Mr Walter Long, that great Agricultural 
Minister, danced upon the mountains like a 
flame. It is far more absurd to suggest that 
no man can see the green flag unless he has 
some green in his eye. In truth this association 
between an Irish sympathy and an Irish an- 
cestry is just as insulting as the old jibe of 
Buckingham, about an Irish interest or an 
Irish understanding. 

It may seem fanciful to say of the Irish 
nationalists that they are sometimes too Irish 
to be national. Yet this is really the case in 
those who would turn nationality from a 
sanctity to a secret. That is, they are turning 
it from something which every one else ought 
146 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

to respect, to something which no one else can 
understand. Nationalism is a nobler thing 
even than patriotism; for nationalism appeals 
to a law of nations ; it implies that a nation is 
a normal thing, and therefore one of a number 
of normal things. It is impossible to have a 
nation without Christendom; as it is impossible 
to have a citizen without a city. Now normally- 
speaking this is better understood in Ireland 
than in England; but the Irish have an 
opposite exaggeration and error, and tend in 
some cases to the cult of real insularity. In 
this sense it is true to say that the error is 
indicated in the very name of Sinn Fein. But 
I think it is even more encouraged, in a cloudier 
and therefore more perilous fashion, by much 
that is otherwise valuable in the cult of the 
Celts and the study of the old Irish language. 
It is a great mistake for a man to defend him- 
self as a Celt when he might defend himself 
as a Irishman. For the former defence will 
turn on some tricky question of temperament, 
while the latter will turn on the central pivot of 
147 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

morals. Celticism, by itself, might lead to all 
the racial extravagances which have lately led 
more barbaric races a dance. Celts also might 
come to claim, not that their nation is a normal 
thing, but that their race is a unique thing. 
Celts also might end by arguing not for an 
equality founded on the respect for boundaries, 
but for an aristocracy founded on the ramifica- 
tion of blood. Celts also might come to pitting 
the prehistoric against the historic, the heathen 
against the Christian, and in that sense the 
barbaric against the civilised. In that sense 
I confess I do not care about Celts; they 
are too like Teutons. 

Now of course every one knows that there 
is practically no such danger of Celtic Imperial- 
ism. Mr Lloyd George will not attempt to 
annex Brittany as a natural part of Britain. 
No Tories, however antiquated, will extend 
their empire in the name of the True Blue 
of the Ancient Britons. Nor is there the least 
likelihood that the Irish will overrun Scotland 
on the plea of an Irish origin for the old name 
148 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

of the Scots; or that they will set up an Irish 
capital at Stratford-on-Avon merely because 
avon is the Celtic word for water. That is the 
sort of thing that Teutonic ethnologists do; 
but Celts are not quite so stupid as that, even 
when they are ethnologists. It may be 
suggested that this is because even prehistoric 
Celts seem to have been rather more civilised 
than historic Teutons. And indeed I have 
seen ornaments and utensils in the admirable 
Dublin museum, suggestive of a society of 
immense antiquity, and much more advanced 
in the arts of life than the Prussians were, only 
a few centuries ago. For instance, there was 
something that looked like a sort of safety razor. 
I doubt if the godlike Goths had much use for 
a razor; or if they had, if it was altogether safe. 
Nor am I so dull as not to be stirred to an 
imaginative sympathy with the instinct of 
modern Irish poetry to praise this primordial 
and mysterious order, even as a sort of pagan 
paradise; and that not as regarding a legend 
as a sort of lie, but a tradition as a sort of truth. 
149 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

It is but another hint of a suggestion, huge 
yet hidden, that civilisation is older than bar- 
barism; and that the farther we go back into 
pagan origins, the nearer we come to the great 
Christian origin of the Fall. But whatever 
credit or sympathy be due to the cult of Celtic 
origins in its proper place, it is none of these 
things that really prevents Celticism from being 
a barbarous imperialism like Teutonism. The 
thing that prevents imperialism is nationalism. 
It was exactly because Germany was not a 
nation that it desired more and more to be an 
empire. For a patriot is a sort of lover, and 
a lover is a sort of artist; and the artist will 
always love a shape too much to wish it to grow 
shapeless, even in order to grow large. A 
group of Teutonic tribes will not care how many 
other tribes they destroy or absorb; and Celtic 
tribes when they were heathen may have acted, 
for all I know, in the same way. But the 
civiHsed Irish nation, a part and product of 
Christendom, has certainly no desire to be 
entangled with other tribes, or to have its 
150 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

outlines blurred with great blots like Liverpool 
and Glasgow, as well as Belfast. In that sense 
it is far too self-conscious to be selfish. Its 
individuality may, as I shall suggest, make it 
too insular; it will not make it too imperial. 
This is a merit in nationalism too little noted; 
that even what is called its narrowness is not 
merely -a barrier to invasion, but a barrier to 
expansion. Therefore, with all respect to the 
prehistoric Celts, I feel more at home with 
the good if sometimes mad Christian gentle- 
men of the Young Ireland movement, or even 
the Easter Rebellion. I should feel more safe 
with Meagher of the Sword than with the 
primitive Celt of the safety razor. The micro- 
scopic meanness of the Mid- Victorian English 
writers, when they wrote about Irish patriots, 
could see nothing but a very small joke in 
modern rebels thinking themselves worthy to 
take the titles of antique kings. But the only 
doubt I should have, if I had any, is whether 
the heathen kings were worthy of the Christian 
rebels. I am murh more sure of the heroism 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

of the modern Fenians than of the ancient 
ones. 

Of the artistic side of the cult of the Celts 
I do not especially speak here. And indeed 
its importance, especially to the Irish, may 
easily be exaggerated. Mr W. B. Yeats long ago 
dissociated himself from a merely racial theory 
of Irish poetry; and Mr W. B. Yeats thinks as 
hard as he talks. I often entirely disagree with 
him; but I disagree far more with the people 
who find him a poetical opiate, where I always 
find him a logical stimulant. For the rest. 
Celticism in some aspects is largely a con- 
spiracy for leading the Englishman a dance, if 
it be a fairy dance. I suspect that many names 
and announcements are printed in Gaelic, not 
because Irishmen can read them, but because 
Englishmen can't. The other great modern 
mystic in Dublin, entertained us first by 
telling an English lady present that she 
would never resist the Celtic atmosphere, 
struggle how she might, but would soon be 
wandering in the mountain mists with a fillet 
152 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

round her head; which fate had apparently 
overtaken the son or nephew of an Anglican 
bishop who had strayed into those parts. The 
English lady, whom I happen to know rather 
well, made the characteristic announcement 
that she would go to Paris when she felt it 
coming on. But it seemed to me that such 
drastic action was hardly necessary, and that 
there was comparatively little cause for alarm; 
seeing that the mountain mists certainly had 
not had that effect on the people who happen 
to live in the mountains. I knew that the 
poet knew, even better than I did, that Irish 
peasants do not wander about in fillets, or in- 
deed wander about at all, having plenty of much 
better work to do. And since the Celtic 
atmosphere had no perceptible effect on the 
Celts, I felt no alarm about its effect on the 
Saxons. But the only thing involved, by way 
of an effect on the Saxons, was a practical joke 
on the Saxons ; which may, however, have lasted 
longer in the case of the bishop's son than 
it did in mine. Anyhow, I continued to move 
^53 



I^HE MISTAKE OP IRELAND 

about (like Atalanta in Calydon) with un- 
chapleted hair, with unfilleted cheek; and 
found a sufficient number of Irish people in the 
same condition to prevent me from feeling shy. 
In a word, all that sort of thing is simply the 
poet*s humour, especially his good humour, 
which is of a golden and godlike sort. And a 
man would be very much misled by the prac- 
tical joke if he does not realise that the joker is 
a practical man. On the desk in front of him as 
he spoke were business papers of reports and 
statistics, much more concerned with fillets of 
veal than fillets of vision. That is the essential 
fact about all this side of such men in Ireland. 
We may think the Celtic ghost a turnip ghost; 
but we can only doubt the reality of the 
ghost; there is no doubt of the reality of the 
turnip. 

But if the Celtic pose be a piece of the Celtic 
ornament, the spirit that produced it does also 
produce some more serious tendencies to the 
segregation of Ireland, one might almost say 
the secretion of Ireland. In this sense it is 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

true that there is too much separatism in 
Ireland. I do not speak of separation from 
England, which, as I have said, happened 
long ago in the only serious sense, and is a 
condition to be assumed, not a conclusion to be 
avoided. Nor do I mean separation from some 
federation of free states including England; 
for that -is a conclusion that could still be 
avoided with a little common sense and common 
honesty in our own politics. I mean separa- 
tion from Europe, from the common Christian 
civilisation by whose law the nations live. I 
would be understood as speaking here of 
exceptions rather than the rule; for the rule is 
rather the other way. The Catholic religion, 
the most fundamental fact in Ireland, is itself 
a permanent communication with the Conti- 
nent. So, as I have said, is the free peasantry 
which is so often the economic expression of 
the same faith. Mr James Stephens, himself 
a spiritually detached man of genius, told me 
with great humour a story which is also at 
least a symbol. A Catholic priest, after a 

I.I. 155 L 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

convivial conversation and plenty of good wine, 
said to him confidentially : " You ought to be 
a Catholic. You can be saved without being 
a Catholic; but you can't be Irish without 
being a Catholic." 

Nevertheless, the exceptions are large enough 
to be dangers; and twice lately, I think, they 
have brought Ireland into danger. This is the 
age of minorities; of groups that rule rather 
than represent. And the two largest parties 
in Ireland, though more representative than 
most parties in England, were too much 
affected, I fancy, by the modern fashion, 
expressed in the world of fads by being Celtic 
rather than Catholic. They were just a little 
too insular to accept the old unconscious wave 
of Christendom; the Crusade. But the case 
was more extraordinary than that. They were 
even too insular to appreciate, not so much 
their own international needs, as their own 
international importance. It may seem a 
strange paradox to say that both nationalist 
parties underrated Ireland as a nation. It may 
1^6 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

seem a more startling paradox to say that in 
this the most nationalist was the least national. 
Yet I think I can explain, however roughly, 
what I mean by saying that this is so. 

It is primarily Sinn Fein, or the extreme 
national party, which thus relatively failed to 
realise that Ireland is a nation. At least it 
failed in nationalism exactly so far as it failed 
to intervene in the war of the nations against 
Prussian imperialism. For its argument 
involved, unconsciously, the proposition that 
Ireland is not a nation; that Ireland is a tribe 
or a settlement, or a chance sprinkling of 
aborigines. If the Irish were savages oppressed 
by the British Empire, they might well be 
indifferent to the fate of the British Empire; 
but as they were civilised men, they could not 
be indifferent to the fate of civilisation. The 
Kaffirs might conceivably be better off if the 
whole system of white colonisation, Boer and 
British, broke down and disappeared altogether. 
The Irish might sympathise with the Kaffirs, 
but they would not like to be classed with the 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

Kaffirs. Hottentots might have a sort of 
Hottentot happiness if the last European city- 
had fallen in ruins, or the last European had 
died in torments. But the Irish would never 
be Hottentots, even if they were pro-Hotten- 
tots. In other words, if the Irish were what 
Cromwell thought they were, they might well 
confine their attention to Hell and Connaught, 
and have no sympathy to spare for France. 
But if the Irish are what Wolfe Tone thought 
they were, they must be interested in France, 
as he was interested in France. In short, A£ 
the Irish are barbarians, they need not trouble 
about other barbarians sacking the cities of the 
world; but if they are citizens, they must 
trouble about the cities that are sacked. This 
is the deep and real reason why their alienation 
from the Allied cause was a disaster for their 
own national cause. It was not because it gave 
fools a chance of complaining that they were 
anti - English, it was because it gave much 
cleverer people the chance of complaining that 
they were anti - European. I entirely agree 

158 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

that the alienation was chiefly the fault of the 
English Government; I even agree that it 
required an abnormal imaginative magnanimity 
for an Irishman to do his duty to Ireland, in 
spite of being so insolently told to do it. But 
it is none the less true that Ireland to-day 
would be ten thousand miles nearer her deliver- 
ance if the Irishman could have made that 
effort; if he had realised that the thing ought 
to be done, not because such rulers wanted it^ 
but rather although they wanted it. 

But the much more curious fact is this. 
There were any number of Irishmen, and those 
among the most Irish, who did reaUse this; 
who realised it with so sublime a sincerity as to 
fight for their own enemies against the world's 
enemies, and consent at once to be insulted by 
the English and killed by the Germans. The 
Redmonds and the old Nationalist party, if 
they have indeed failed, have the right to be 
reckoned among the most heroic of all the heroic 
failures of Ireland. If theirs is a lost cause, 
it is wholly worthy of a land where lost causes 
159 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

are never lost. But the old guard of Redmond 
did also in its time, I fancy, fall into the same 
particular and curious error, but in a more 
subtle way and on a seemingly remote subject. 
They also, whose motives like those of the Sinn 
Feiners were entirely noble, did in one sense 
fail to be national, in the sense of appreciating 
the international importance of a nation. In 
their case it was a matter of English and not 
European politics; and as their case was much 
more complicated, I speak with much less 
confidence about it. But I think there was a 
highly determining time in politics when 
certain Irishmen got on to the wrong side in 
English politics, as other Irishmen afterwards 
got on to the wrong side in European politics. 
And by the wrong side, in both cases, I not 
only mean the side that was not consistent with 
the truth, but the side that was not really con- 
genial to the Irish. A man may act against 
the body, even the main body, of his nation; 
but if he acts against the soul of his nation, 
even to save it, he and his nation suffer. 
i6o 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

I can best explain what I mean by reaffirm- 
ing the reality which an English visitor really 
found in Irish politics, towards the end of the 
war. It may seem odd to say that the most 
hopeful fact I found, for Anglo-Irish relations, 
was the fury with which the Irish were all 
accusing the English of perjury and treason. 
Yet this- was my solid and sincere impression; 
the happiest omen was the hatred aroused by 
the disappointment over Home Rule. For 
men are not furious unless they are disappointed 
of something they really want; and men are not 
disappointed except about something they were 
really ready to accept. If Ireland had been 
entirely in favour of entire separation, the loss 
of Home Rule would not be felt as a loss, but 
if anything as an escape. But it is felt bitterly 
and savagely as a loss; to that at least I can 
testify with entire certainty. I may or may not 
be right in the belief I build on it; but I 
believe it would still be felt as a gain; that 
Dominion Home Rule would in the long run 
satisfy Ireland. But it would satisfy her if it 
i6i 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

were given to her, not if it were promised to 
her. As it is, the Irish regard our Government 
simply as a liar who has broken his word; I 
cannot express how big and black that simple 
idea bulks in the landscape and blocks up the 
road. And without professing to regard it as 
quite so simple, I regard it as substantially 
true. It is, upon any argument, an astounding 
thing the King, Lords, and Commons of a 
great nation should record on its statute-book 
that a law exists, and then illegally reverse it 
in answer to the pressure of private persons. 
It is, and must be, for the people benefited by 
the law, an act of treason. The Irish were not 
wrong in thinking it an act of treason, even in 
the sense of treachery and trickery. Where 
they were wrong, I regret to say, was in talking 
of it as if it were the one supreme solitary 
example of such trickery; when the whole of 
our politics were full of such tricks. In short, 
the loss of justice for Ireland was simply a part 
of the loss of justice in England; the loss of all 
moral authority in government, the loss of the 
162 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

popularity of Parliament, the secret plutocracy 
which makes it easy to take a bribe or break a 
pledge, the corruption that can pass unpopular 
laws or promote discredited men. The law- 
giver cannot enforce his law because, whether 
or no the law be popular, the law-giver is wholly 
unpopular, and is perpetually passing wholly 
unpopular laws. Intrigue has been substituted 
for government; and the public man cannot 
appeal to the public because all the most 
important part of his policy is conducted in 
private. The modern politician conducts his 
public life in private. He sometimes condes- 
cends to make up for it by affecting to conduct 
his private life in public. He will put his baby 
or his birthday book into the illustrated papers ; 
it is his dealings with the colossal millions of the 
cosmopolitan millionaires that he puts in his 
pocket or his private safe. We are allowed to 
know all about his dogs and cats; but not 
about those larger and more dangerous animals, 
his bulls and bears. 

Now there was a moment when England 
163 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

had an opportunity of breaking down this 
parliamentary evil, as Europe afterwards had 
an opportunity (which it fortunately took) of 
breaking down the Prussian evil. The corrup- 
tion was common to both parties; but the 
chance of exposing it happened to occur under 
the rule of a Home Rule party; which the 
Nationalists supported solely for the sake of 
Home Rule. In the Marconi Case they con- 
sented to whitewash the tricks of Jew jobbers 
whom they must have despised, just as some 
of the Sinn Feiners afterwards consented to 
whitewash the wickedness of Prussian bullies 
whom they also must have despised. In both 
cases the motive was wholly disinterested and 
even idealistic. It was the practicality that was 
unpractical. I was one of a small group which 
protested against the hushing up of the Marconi 
affair, but we always did justice to the patriotic 
intentions of the Irish who allowed it. But we 
based our criticism of their strategy on the 
principle oijalsus in uno^fahus in omnibus. The 
man who will cheat you about one thing will 
164 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

cheat you about another. The men who will 
lie to you about Marconi, will lie to you about 
Home Rule. The political conventions that 
allow of dealing in Marconis at one price for 
the party, and another price for oneself, are 
conventions that also allow of telling one story 
to Mr John Redmond and another to Sir 
Edward. Carson. The man who will imply one 
state of things when talking at large in 
Parliament, and another state of things when 
put into a witness-box in court, is the same 
sort of man who will promise an Irish settle- 
ment in the hope that it may fail; and then 
withdraw it for fear it should succeed. Among 
the many muddle-headed modern attempts 
to coerce the Christian poor to the Moslem 
dogma about wine and beer, one was con- 
cerned with abuse by loafers or tipplers of 
the privilege of the Sunday traveller. It was 
suggested that the travellers* claims were in 
every sense travellers' tales. It was therefore 
proposed that the limit of three miles should 
be extended to six; as if it were any harder for 

165 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

a liar to say he had walked six miles than three. 
The politicians might be as ready to promise 
to walk the six miles to an Irish Republic as the 
three miles to an Irish Parliament. But Sinn 
Fein is mistaken in supposing that any change 
of theoretic claim meets the problem of corrup- 
tion. Those who would break their word to 
Redmond would certainly break it to De 
Valera. We urged all these things on the 
Nationalists whose national cause we supported ; 
we asked them to follow their larger popular 
instincts, break down a corrupt oligarchy, and 
let a real popular parliament in England give 
a real popular parliament to Ireland. With 
entirely honourable motives, they adhered to 
the narrower conception of their national duty. 
They sacrificed everything for Home Rule, 
even their own profoundly national emotion of 
contempt. For the sake of Home Rule, or the 
solemn promise of Home Rule, they kept such 
men in power; and for their reward they found 
that such men were still in power; and Home 
Rule was gone. 

i66 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

What I mean about the Nationalist Party, 
and what may be called its prophetic shadow of 
the Sinn Fein mistake, may well be symbolised 
in one of the noblest figures of that party or any 
party. An Irish poet, talking to me about the 
pointed diction of the Irish peasant, said he had 
recently rejoiced in the society of a drunken 
Kerry farmer, whose conversation was a litany 
of questions about everything in heaven and 
earth, each ending with a sort of chorus of 
* Will ye tell me that now ? * And at the end 
of all he said abruptly, * Did ye know Tom 
Kettle ? ' and on my friend the poet assenting, 
the farmer said, as if in triumph, * And why 
are so many people alive that ought to be dead, 
and so many people dead that ought to be 
alive ? Will ye tell me that now ? ' That is 
not unworthy of an old heroic poem, and there- 
fore not unworthy of the hero and poet of whom 
it was spoken. * Patroclus died, who was a 
better man than you.' Thomas Michael 
Kettle was perhaps the greatest example of 
that greatness of spirit which was so ill 

167 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

rewarded on both sides of the channel and of 
the quarrel, which marked Redmond's brother 
and so many of Redmond's followers. He was a 
wit, a scholar, an orator, a man ambitious in all 
the arts of peace; and he fell fighting the 
barbarians because he was too good a European 
to use the barbarians against England, as 
England a hundred years before had used the 
barbarians against Ireland. There is nothing 
to be said of such things except what the 
drunken farmer said, unless it be a verse from 
a familiar ballad on a very remote topic, which 
happens to express my own most immediate 
feelings about politics and reconstruction after 
the decimation of the great war. 

The many men so beautiful 

And they all dead did lie: 

And a thousand thousand slimy things 

Lived on, and so did L 

It is not a reflection that adds any inordinate 
self-satisfaction to the fact of one's own survival. 
In turning over a collection of Kettle's 
i68 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

extraordinary varied and vigorous writings, 
which contain some of the most pointed and 
piercing criticisms of materialism, of modern 
capitalism and mental and moral anarchism 
generally, I came on a very interesting criticism 
of myself and my friends in our Marconi 
agitation; a suggestion, on a note of genial 
cynicism, that we were asking for an impossible 
political purity; a suggestion which, knowing 
it to be patriotic, I will venture to call pathetic. 
I will not now return on such disagreements 
with a man with whom I so universally agree; 
but it will not be unfair to find here an exact 
illustration of what I mean by saying that the 
national leaders, so far from merely failing as 
wild Irishmen, only failed when they were not 
instinctive enough, that is, not Irish enough. 
Kettle was a patriot whose impulse was practical, 
and whose policy was impolitic. Here also 
the Nationalist underrated the importance of 
the intervention of his own nationality. Ketde 
left a Rne and even terrible poem, asking if his 
sacrifices were in vain, and whether he and his 
169 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

people were again being betrayed. I think 
nobody can deny that he was betrayed; but it 
was not by the English soldiers with whom he 
marched to war, but by those very English 
politicians with whom he sacrificed so much to 
remain at peace. No man will ever dare to say 
his death in battle was in vain, not only because 
in the highest sense it could never be, but 
because even in the lowest sense it was not. 
He hated the icy insolence of Prussia; and 
that ice is broken, and already as weak as water. 
As Carlyle said of a far lesser thing, that at 
least will never through unending ages insult 
the face of the sun any more. The point is 
here that if any part of his fine work was in 
vain, it was certainly not the reckless romantic 
part; it was precisely the plodding parliamen- 
tary part. None can say that the weary march- 
ing and counter-marching in France was a 
thing thrown away; not only in the sense which 
consecrates all footprints along such a via 
cruciSy or highway of the army of martyrs; but 
also in the perfectly practical sense, that the 
170 



THE MISTAKE OF IRELAND 

army was going somewhere, and that it got 
there. But it might possibly be said that the 
weary marching and counter-marching at West- 
minster, in and out of a division lobby, belonged 
to what the French call the salle des pas perdus. 
If anything was practical it was the visionary 
adventure; if anything was unpractical it was 
the practical compromise. He and his friends 
were betrayed by the men whose corruptions 
they had contemptuously condoned, far more 
than by the men whose bigotries they had 
indignantly denounced. There darkened about 
them treason and disappointment, and he that 
was the happiest died in battle; and one who 
knew and loved him spoke to me for a million 
others in saying : * And now we will not give 
you a dead dog until you keep your word/ 



I.I. 171 M 



CHAPTER VIII 



AN EXAMPLE AND A QUESTION 

We all had occasion to rejoice at the return of 
Sherlock Holmes when he was supposed to be 
dead; and I presume we may soon rejoice in 
his return even when he is really dead. Sir 
Arthur Conan Doyle, in his widespread new 
campaign in favour of Spiritualism, ought at 
least to delight us with the comedy of Holmes 
as a control and Watson as a medium. But I 
have for the moment a use for the great 
detective not concerned with the psychical side 
of the question. Of that I will only say, in 
passing, that in this as in many other cases, 
I find myself in agreement with an authority 
about where the line is drawn between good 
and bad, but have the misfortune to think his 
good bad, and his bad good. Sir Arthur 
explains that he would Hft Spiritualism to a 
175 



AN EXAMPLE AND 

graver and more elevated plane of idealism; 
and that he quite agrees with his critics that the 
mere tricks with tables and chairs are grotesque 
and vulgar. I think this quite true if turned 
upside down, like the table. I do not mind the 
grotesque and vulgar part of Spiritualism; 
what I object to is the grave and elevating part. 
After all, a miracle is a miracle and means 
something; it means that Materialism is non- 
sense. But it is not true that a message is 
always a message; and it sometimes only means 
that Spiritualism is also nonsense. If the table 
at which I am now writing takes to itself wings 
and flies out of the window, perhaps carrying 
me along with it, the incident will arouse in me 
a real intelligent interest, verging on surprise. 
But if the pen with which I am writing begins 
to scrawl, all by itself, the sort of things I have 
seen in spirit writing; if it begins to say that 
all things are aspects of universal purity and 
peace, and so on, why, then I shall not only be 
annoyed, but also bored. If a great man like 
the late Sir William Crookes says a table went 
176 



A QUESTION 

walking upstairs, I im impressed by the news; 
but not by news from nowhere to the effect that 
all men are perpetually walking upstairs, up a 
spiritual staircase, which seems to be as 
mechanical and labour-saving as a moving 
staircase at Charing Cross. Moreover, even 
a benevolent spirit might conceivably throw 
the furniture about merely for fun; whereas 
I doubt if anything but a devil from hell would 
say that all things are aspects of purity and 
peace. 

But I am here taking from the Spiritualistic 
articles a text that has nothing to do with 
Spiritualism. In a recent contribution to 
Nash's Magazine^ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
remarks very truly that the modern world is 
weary and wicked and in need of a religion; 
and he gives examples of its more typical and 
terrible corruptions. It is perhaps natural 
that he should revert to the case of the Congo, 
and talk of it in the torrid fashion which recalls 
the days when Morel and Casement had some 
credit in English politics. We have since had 
177 



AN EXAMPLE AND 

an opportunity of judging the real attitude of 
a man like Morel in the plainest case of black 
and white injustice that the world has ever 
seen. It was at once a replica and a reversal of 
the position expressed in the Pious Editor's 
Creed, and might roughly be rendered in 
similar language. 

I do believe in Freedom's cause 
Ez fur away ez tropics are; 
But Belgians caught in Prussia's claws 
To me less tempting topics are. 
It's wal agin a foreign king 
To rouse the chapel's rigours; 
But Liberty's a kind of thing 
We only owe to niggers. 

He had of course a lurid denunciation of the 
late King Leopold, of which I will only say 
that, uttered by a Belgian about the Belgian 
king in his own land and lifetime, it would be 
highly courageous and largely correct; but 
that the parallel test is how much truth was told 
by British journalists about British kings in 

178 



A QUESTION 

their own land and lifetime; and that until we 
can pass that test, such denunciations do us 
very little good. But what interests me in the 
matter at the moment is this. Sir Arthur feels 
it right to say something about British corrup- 
tions, and passes from the Congo to Putumayo, 
touching a little more lightly; for even the 
most honest Britons have an unconscious trick 
of touching more lightly on the case of British 
capitalists. He says that our capitalists were 
not guilty of direct cruelty, but of an attitude 
careless and even callous. But what strikes 
me is that Sir Arthur, with his taste for such 
protests and inquiries, need not have wandered 
quite so far from his own home as the forests 
of South America. 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is an Irishman; 
and in his own country, within my own memory, 
there occurred a staggering and almost incred- 
ible crime, or series of crimes, which were 
worthier than anything in the world of the 
attention of Sherlock Holmes in fiction, or 
Conan Doyle in reality. It always will be a 
179 



AN EXAMPLE AND 

tribute to the author of Sherlock Holmes that he 
did, about the same time, do such good work 
in reality. He made an admirable plea for 
Adolf Beck and Oscar Slater; he was also 
connected, I remember, with the reversal of a 
miscarriage of justice in a case of cattle- 
mutilation. And all this, while altogether to 
his credit, makes it seem all the more strange 
that his talents could not be used for, and in, 
his own home and native country, in a mystery 
that had the dimensions of a monstrosity, and 
which did involve, if I remember right, a 
question of cattle-maiming. Anyhow, it was 
concerned with moonlighters and the charges 
made against them, such as the common one 
of cutting off the tails of cows. I can imagine 
Sherlock Holmes on such a quest, keen-eyed 
and relentless, finding the cloven hoof of some 
sinister and suspected cow. I can imagine 
Dr Watson, like the cow*s tail, always behind. 
I can imagine Sherlock Holmes remarking, in 
a light allusive fashion, that he himself had 
written a little monograph on the subject of 
i8o 



A QUESTION 

cows' tails; with diagrams and tables solving 
the great traditional problem of how many 
cows* tails would reach the moon; a subject 
of extraordinary interest to moonlighters. And 
I can still more easily imagine him saying after- 
wards, having resumed the pipe and dressing- 
gown of Baker Street, * A remarkable little 
problem, Watson. In some of its features it 
was perhaps more singular than any you have 
been good enough to report. I do not think 
that even the Tooting Trouser-Stretching 
Mystery, or the singular little affair of the 
Radium Toothpick, offered more strange and 
sensational developments.* For if the cele- 
brated pair had really tracked out the Irish 
crime I have in mind, they would have found 
a story which, considered merely as a detective 
story, is by far the most dramatic and dreadful 
of modern times. Like nearly all such sensa- 
tional stories, it traced the crime to somebody 
far higher in station and responsibility than 
any of those suspected. Like many of the most 
sensational of them, it actually traced the crime 
i8i 



AN EXAMPLE AND 

to the detective who was investigating it. For 
if they had really crawled about with a magnify- 
ing glass, studying the supposed footprints of 
the peasants incriminated, they would have 
found they were made by the boots of the 
policeman. And the boots of a policeman, one 
feels, are things that even Watson might 
recognise. 

I have told the astounding story of Sergeant 
Sheridan before; and I shall often tell it again. 
Hardly any English people know it; and I 
shall go on telling it in the hope that all English 
people may know it some day. It ought to be 
first in every collection of causes dUhres^ in every 
book about criminals, in every book of historical 
mysteries; and on its merits it would be. It 
is not in any of them. It is not there because 
there is a motive, in all modern British plu- 
tocracy, against finding the big British mis- 
carriages of justice where they are really to be 
found; and that is a great deal nearer than 
Putumayo. It is a place far more appropriate 
to the exploits of the family of the Doyles. It 
182 



A QUESTION 

is called Ireland; and in that place a powerful 
British official named Sheridan had been highly 
successful in the imperial service by convicting 
a series of poor Irishmen of agrarian crimes. 
It was afterwards discovered that the British 
official had carefully com.mitted every one of 
the crimes himself; and then, with equal 
foresight, perjured himself to imprison 
innocent men. Any one who does not know 
the story will naturally ask what punishment 
was held adequate for such a Neronian 
monster; I will tell him. He was bowed out 
of the country like a distinguished stran- 
ger, his expenses politely paid, as if he had 
been delivering a series of instructive lectures ; 
and he is now probably smoking a cigar in an 
American hotel, and much more comfortable 
than any poor policeman who has done his 
duty. I defy anybody to deny him a place in 
our literature about great criminals. Charles 
Peace escaped many times before conviction; 
Sheridan escaped altogether after conviction. 
Jack the Ripper was safe because he was 

183 



AN EXAMPLE AND 

undiscovered; Sheridan was discovered and was 
still safe. But I only repeat the matter here 
for two reasons. First, we may call our rule in 
Ireland what we like ; we may call it the union 
when there is no union ; we may call it Protestant 
ascendancy when we are no longer Protestants; 
or Teutonic lordship when we could only 
be ashamed of being Teutons. But this is 
what it /j, and everything else is waste of words. 
And second, because an Irish investigator of 
cattle-maiming, so oblivious of the Irish cow, 
is in some danger of figuring as an Irish bull. 
Anyhow, that is the real and remarkable 
story of Sergeant Sheridan, and I put it first 
because it is the most practical test of the 
practical question of whether Ireland is mis- 
governed. It is strictly a fair test; for it is a 
test by the minimum and an argument a 
fortiori. A British official in Ireland can run 
a career of crime, punishing innocent people 
for his own felonies, and when he is found out, 
he is found to be above the law. This may 
seem like putting things at the worst, but it is 
184 



A QUESTION 

really putting them at the best. This story was 
not told us on the word of a wild Irish Fenian^ 
or even a responsible Irish Nationalist. It was 
told, word for word as I have told it, by the 
Unionist Minister in charge of the matter and 
reporting it, with regret and shame, to Parlia- 
ment. He was not one of the worst Irish Secre- 
taries, who might be responsible for the worst 
rigime\ on the contrary, he was by far the best. 
If even he could only partially restrain or reveal 
such things, there can be no deduction in 
common sense except that in the ordinary way 
such things go on gaily in the dark, with 
nobody to reveal and nobody to restrain them. 
It was not something done in those dark days 
of torture and terrorism, which happened in 
Ireland a hundred years ago, and which 
Englishmen talk of as having happened a 
milHon years ago. It was something that 
happened quite recently, in my own mature 
manhood, about the time that the better things 
like the Land Acts were already before the 
world. I remember writing to the Westminster 

185 



AN EXAMPLE AND 

Gazette to emphasise it when it occurred; but 
it seems to have passed out of memory in an 
almost half-witted fashion. But that peep- 
hole into hell has afforded me ever since a 
horrible amusement, when I hear the Irish 
softly rebuked for remembering old unhappy 
far-off things and wrongs done in the Dark 
Ages. Thus I was especially amused to find 
the Rev. R. J. Campbell saying that * Ireland 
has been petted and coddled more than any 
other part of the British Isles '; because Mr 
Campbell was chiefly famous for a comfortable 
creed himself, for saying that evil is only * a 
shadow where light should be * ; and there is 
no doubt here of his throwing a very black 
shadow where light is very much required. 
I will conceive the policeman at the corner of 
the street in which Mr Campbell resides as in 
the habit of killing a crossing-sweeper every 
now and then for his private entertainment, 
burgling the houses of Mr Campbell's neigh- 
bours, cutting off the tails of their carriage 
horses, and otherwise disporting himself by 
i86 



A QUESTION 

moonlight like a fairy. It is his custom to visit 
the consequences of each of these crimes upon 
the Rev. R. J. Campbell, whom he arrests at 
intervals, successfully convicts by perjury, and 
proceeds to coddle in penal servitude. But I 
have another reason for mentioning Mr Camp- 
bell, a gentleman whom I heartily respect in 
many other aspects ; and the reason is connected 
with his name, as it occurs in another connec- 
tion on another page. It shows how in any- 
thing, but especially in anything coming from 
Ireland, the old facts of family and faith out- 
weigh a million modern philosophies. The 
words in Whos Who — * Ulster Protestant of 
Scottish ancestry ' — give the really Irish and 
the really honourable reason for Mr Camp- 
bell's extraordinary remark. A man may 
preach for years, with radiant universalism, 
that many waters cannot quench love; but 
Boyne Water can. Mr Campbell appears very 
promptly with what Kettle called * a bucketful 
of Boyne, to put the sunrise out.' I will not 
take the opportunity of saying, like the 

!.!• 187 N 



AN EXAMPLE AND 

Ulsterman, that there never was treason yet but 
a Campbell was at the bottom of it. But I will 
say that there never was Modernism yet but 
a Calvinist was at the bottom of it. The old 
theology is much livelier than the New 
Theology. 

Many other such true tales could be told; 
but what we need here is a sort of test. This 
tale is a test; because it is the best that could 
be said, about the best that could be done, by 
the best Englishman ruling Ireland, in face of 
the English system established there; and it 
is the best, or at any rate the most, that we can 
know about that system. Another truth which 
might also serve as a test, is this ; to note among 
the responsible English not only their testi- 
mony against each other, but their testimony 
against themselves. I mean the consideration 
of how very rapidly we realise that our own 
conduct in Ireland has been infamous, not in 
the remote past, but in the very recent past. 
I have lived just long enough to see the wheel 
come full circle inside one generation; when 
i88 



A QUESTION 

I was a schoolboy, the sort of Kensington middle 
class to which I belong was nearly solidly 
resisting, not only the first Home Rule Bill, 
but any suggestion that the Land League had 
a leg to stand on, or that the landlords need do 
anything but get their rents or kick out their 
tenants. The whole Unionist Press, which was 
three-quarters of the Press, simply supported 
Clanricarde, and charged any one who did not 
do so with supporting the Clan-na-Gael. Mr 
Balfour was simply admired for enforcing the 
system, which it is his real apologia to have 
tried to end, or at least to have allowed Wynd- 
ham to end. I am not yet far gone in senile 
decay; but already I have lived to hear my 
countrymen talk about their own blind policy 
in the time of the Land League, exactly as they 
talked before of their blind policy in the time 
of the Limerick Treaty. The shadow on our 
past, shifts forward as we advance into the 
future; and always seems to end just behind us. 
I was told in my youth that the age-long mis- 
government of Ireland lasted down to about 
189 



AN EXAMPLE AND 

1870; it is now agreed among all intelligent 
people that it lasted at least down to about 
1890. A little common sense, after a hint like 
the Sheridan case, will lead one to suspect the 
simple explanation that it is going on still. 

Now I heard scores of such stories as the 
Sheridan story in Ireland, many of which I 
mention elsewhere; but I do not mention 
them here because they cannot be publicly 
tested; and that for a very simple reason. We 
must accept all the advantages and disadvan- 
tages of a rule of absolute and iron militarism. 
We cannot impose silence and then sift stories; 
we cannot forbid argument and then ask for 
proof; we cannot destroy rights and then dis- 
cover wrongs. I say this quite impartially in 
the matter of militarism itself. I am far from 
certain that soldiers are worse rulers than 
lawyers and merchants ; and I am quite certain 
that a nation has a right to give abnormal power 
to its soldiers in time of war. I only say that 
a soldier, if he is a sensible soldier, will know 
what he is doing and therefore what he cannot 
190 



A QUESTION 

do; that he cannot gag a man and then cross- 
examine him, any more than he can blow out 
his brains and then convince his intelligence. 
There may be ; humanly speaking, there must 
be, a mass of injustices in the militaristic 
government of Ireland. The militarism itself 
may be the least of them ; but it must involve 
the concealment of all the rest. 

It has been remarked above that establishing 
militarism is a thing which a nation had a right 
to do, and (what is not at all the same thing) 
which it may be right in doing. But with that 
very phrase * a nation,* we collide of course 
with the whole real question; the alleged 
abstract wrong about which the Irish talk much 
more than about their concrete wrongs. I have 
put first the matters mentioned above, because 
I wish to make clear, as a matter of common 
sense, the impression of any reasonable out- 
sider that they certainly have concrete wrongs. 
But even those who doubt it, and say that the 
Irish have no concrete grievance but only a 
sentiment of Nationalism, fall into a final and 
191 



AN EXAMPLE AND 

very serious error about the nature of the thing 
called Nationalism, and even the meaning of 
the word * concrete/ For the truth is that, in 
dealing with a nation, the grievance which is 
most abstract of all is also the one which is 
most concrete of all. 

Not only is patriotism a part of practical 
politics, but it is more practical than any 
poUtics. To neglect it, and ask only for 
grievances, is like counting the clouds and 
forgetting the climate. To neglect it, and 
think only of laws, is like seeing the 
landmarks and never seeing the landscape. 
It will be found that the denial of nationality 
is much more of a daily nuisance than the denial 
of votes or the denial of juries. Nationality is 
the most practical thing, because so many 
things are national without being political, or 
without being legal. A man in a conquered 
country feels it when he goes to market or even 
goes to church, which may be more often than 
he goes to law ; and the harvest is more general 
than the General Election, Altering the flag 
192 



A QUESTION 

on the roof is like altering the sun in the sky; 
the very chimney-pots and lamp-posts look 
different. Nay, after a certain interval of 
occupation they are different. As a man would 
know he was in a land of strangers before he 
knew it was a land of savages, so he knows 
a rule is aUen long before he knows it is 
oppressive. It is not necessary for it to 
add injury to insult. 

For instance, when I first walked about 
Dublin, I was disposed to smile at the names 
of the streets being inscribed in Irish as 
well as English. I will not here discuss the 
question of what is called the Irish language, 
the only arguable case against which is that it 
is not the Irish language. But at any rate it is 
not the English language, and I have come to 
appreciate more imaginatively the importance 
of that fact. It may be used rather as a weapon 
than a tool ; but it is a national weapon if it is 
not a national tool. I see the significance of 
having something which the eye commonly 
encounters, as it does a chimney-pot or a 
193 



AN EXAMPLE AND 

lamp-post; but which is like a chimney reared 
above an Irish hearth or a lamp to light an Irish 
road. I see the point of having a solid object in 
the street to remind an Irishman that he is in 
Ireland, as a red pillar-box reminds an English- 
man that he is in England. But there must be 
a thousand things as practical as pillar-boxes 
which remind an Irishman that, if he is in his 
country, it is not yet a free country; everything 
connected with the principal seat of govern- 
ment reminds him of it perpetually. It may 
not be easy for an Englishman to imagine how 
many of such daily details there are. But there 
is, after all, one very simple effort of the fancy, 
which would fix the fact for him for ever. He 
has only to imagine that the Germans have 
conquered London. 

A brilliant writer who has earned -the name 
of a Pacifist, and even a Pro-German, once 
propounded to me his highly personal and even 
perverse type of internationalism by saying, as 
a sort of unanswerable challenge, * Wouldn't 
you rather be ruled by Goethe than by Walter 
194 



A QUESTION 

Long ? * I replied that words could not express 
the wild love and loyalty I should feel for Mr 
Walter Long, if the only alternative were 
Goethe. I could not have put my own national 
case in a clearer or more compact form. I 
might occasionally feel inclined to kill Mr 
Long; but under the approaching shadow of 
Goethe,- I should feel more inclined to kill 
myself. That is the deathly element in de- 
nationalisation; that it poisons life itself, the 
most real of all realities. But perhaps the best 
way of putting the point conversationally is to 
say that Goethe would certainly put up a monu- 
ment to Shakespeare. I would sooner die than 
walk past it every day of my life. And in the 
other case of the street inscriptions, it is well 
to remember that these things, which we also 
walk past every day, are exactly the sort of 
things that always have, in a nameless fashion, 
the national note. If the Germans conquered 
London, they would not need to massacre me 
or even enslave me in order to annoy me; it 
would be quite enough that their notices were 
195 



AN EXAMPLE AND 

in a German style, if not in a German language. 
Suppose I looked up in an English railway 
carriage and saw these words written in 
English exactly as I have seen them in a German 
railway carriage written in German : * The out- 
leaning of the body from the window of the 
carriage is because of the therewith bound up 
life's danger strictly prohibited.* It is not rude. 
It would certainly be impossible to complain 
that it is curt. I should not be annoyed by its 
brutality and brevity; but on the contrary by 
its elaborateness and even its laxity. But if it 
does not exactly shine in lucidity, it gives a 
reason; which after all is a very reasonable 
thing to do. By every cosmopolitan test, it is 
more polite than the sentence I have read in 
my childhood : * Wait until the train stops.* 
This is curt; this might be called rude; but 
it never annoyed me in the least. The nearest 
I can get to defining my sentiment is to say 
that I can sympathise with the Englishman 
who wrote the English notice. Having a rude 
thing to write, he wrote it as quickly as he 
196 



A QUESTION 

could, and went home to his tea; or preferably 
to his beer. But what is too much for me, an 
overpowering vision, is the thought of that 
German calmly sitting down to compose that 
sentence like a sort of essay. It is the thought 
of him serenely waving away the one important 
word till the very end of the sentence, like the 
Day of Judgment to the end of the world. It 
is perhaps the mere thought that he did not 
break down in the middle of it, but endured 
to the end; or that he could afterwards calmly 
review it, and see that sentence go marching 
by, like the whole German army. In short, 
I do not object to it because it is dictatorial 
or despotic or bureaucratic or anything of 
the kind, but simply because it is German. 
Because it is German I do not object to it in 
Germany, Because it is German I should 
violently revolt against it in England. I do not 
revolt against the command to wait until the 
train stops, not because it is less rude, but 
because it is the kind of rudeness I can under- 
stand. The official may be treating me casually, 
197 



AN EXAMPLE AND 

but at least he is not treating himself seriously. 
And so, in return, I can treat him and his notice 
not seriously but casually. I can neglect to 
wait until the train stops, and fall down on the 
platform, as I did on the platform of Wolver- 
hampton, to the permanent damage of that fine 
structure. I can, by a stroke of satiric genius, 
truly national and traditional, the dexterous 
elimination of a single letter, alter the maxim 
to * Wait until the rain stops.* It is a jest as 
profoundly English as the weather to which 
it refers. Nobody would be tempted to take 
such a liberty with the German sentence; not 
only because he would be instantly imprisoned 
in a fortress, but because he would not know 
at which end to begin. 

Now this is the truth which is expressed, 
though perhaps very imperfectly, in things 
like the Gaelic lettering on streets in Dublin. 
It will be wholesome for us who are English 
to realise that there is almost certainly an 
English way of putting things, even the most 
harmless things, which appears to an Irishman 
198 



A QUESTION 

quite as ungainly, unnatural, and ludicrous as 
that German sentence appears to me. As the 
famous Frenchman did not know when he was 
talking prose, the official Englishman does not 
know when he is talking English. He un- 
consciously assumes that he is talking Esperanto. 
Imperialism is not an insanity of patriotism; 
it is merely an illusion of cosmopoli- 
tanism. 

For the national note of the Irish language 
is not peculiar to what used to be called the 
Erse language. The whole nation used the 
tongue common to both nations with a differ- 
ence far beyond a dialect. It is not a difference 
of accent, but a difference of style; which is 
generally a difference of soul. The emphasis, 
the elision, the short cuts and sharp endings of 
speech, show a variety which may be almost 
unnoticeable but is none the less untranslatable. 
It may be only a little more weight on a word, 
or an inversion allowable in English but abound- 
ing in Irish; but we can no more copy it than 
copy the compactness of the French oh or the 
199 



AN EXAMPLE AND 

Latin ablative absolute. The commonest case 
of what I mean, for instance, is the locution that 
lingers in my mind with an agreeable phrase 
from one of Mr Yeats's stories : * Whom I 
shall yet see upon the hob of hell, and them 
screeching/ It is an idiom that gives the effect 
of a pointed postscript, a parting kick or sting 
in the tail of the sentence, which is unfathom- 
ably national. It is noteworthy and even 
curious that quite a crowd of Irishmen, who 
quoted to me with just admiration the noble 
ending of Kathleen-na-Hulahan^ where the new- 
comer is asked if he has seen the old woman who 
is the tragic type of Ireland gcing out, quoted 
his answer in that form, * I did not. But I saw 
a young woman, and she walking like a queen.* 
I say it is curious, because I have since been 
told that in the actual book (which I cannot 
lay my hand on at the moment) a more classic 
English idiom is used. It would generally be 
most unwise to alter the diction of such a master 
of style as Mr Yeats : though indeed it is possible 
that he altered it himself, as he has sometimes 
200 



A QUESTION 

done, and not always, I think, for the better. 
But whether this form came from himself or 
from his countrymen, it was very redolent of 
his country. And there was something in- 
spiring in thus seeing, as it were before one's 
eyes, literature becoming legend. But a hun- 
dred other examples could be given, even from 
my own short experience, of such fine turns of 
language, nor are the finest necessarily to be 
found in literature. It is perfectly true, though 
prigs may overwork and snobs underrate the 
truth, that in a country like this the peasants 
can talk like poets. When I was on the wild 
coast of Donegal, an old unhappy woman who 
had starved through the famines and the evic- 
tions, was telling a lady the tales of those times, 
and she mentioned quite naturally one that 
might have come straight out of times so mysti- 
cal that we should call them mythical, that 
some travellers had met a poor wandering 
woman with a baby in those great gray rocky 
wastes, and asked her who she was. And she 
answered, * I am the Mother of God, and this 

201 



AN EXAMPLE AND 

is Himself, and He is the boy you will all be 
wanting at the last.' 

There is more in that story than can be put 
into any book, even on a matter in which its 
meaning plays so deep a part, and it seems 
almost profane to analyse it however sympatheti- 
cally. But if any one wishes to know what 
I mean by the untranslatable truth which makes 
a language national, it will be worth while to 
look at the mere diction of that speech, and 
note how its whole effect 4urns on certain 
phrases and customs which happen to be 
peculiar to the nation. It is well known that 
in Ireland the husband or head of the house 
is always called * himself * ; nor is it peculiar 
to the peasantry, but adopted, if partly in jest, 
by the gentry. A distinguished Dublin 
publicist, a landlord and leader among the 
more national aristocracy, always called me 
* himself ' when he was talking to my wife. It 
will be noted how a sort of shadow of that 
common meaning mingles with the more 
shining significance of its position in a sentence 
202 



A QUESTION 

where it is also strictly logical, in the sense of 
theological. All literary style, especially national 
style, is made up of such coincidences, which 
are a spiritual sort of puns. That is why 
style is untranslatable; because it is possible 
to render the meaning, but not the double 
meaning. There is even a faint differentiation 
in the half-humorous possibilities of the word 
* boy *; another wholly national nuance. Say 
instead, * And He is the child,' and it is some- 
thing perhaps stiffer, and certainly quite 
different. Take away, * This is Himself ' and 
simply substitute * This is He,' and it is a 
piece of pedantry ten thousand miles from the 
original. But above all it has lost its note of 
something national, because it has lost its note 
of something domestic. All roads in Ireland, 
of fact or folk-lore, of thedlogy or grammar, 
lead us back to that door and hearth of the 
household, that fortress of the family which is 
the key-fortress of the whole strategy of the 
island. The Irish Catholics, like other Chris- 
tians, admit a mystery in the Holy Trinity, but 
I.I. 203 o 



AN EXAMPLE AND 

they may almost be said to admit an experience 
in the Holy Family. Their historical experi- 
ence, alas, has made it seem to them not 
unnatural that the Holy Family should be a 
homeless family. They also have found that 
there was no room for them at the inn, or any- 
where but in the jail ; they also have dragged 
their new-born babes out of their cradles, and 
trailed in despair along the road to Egypt, or 
at least along the road to exile. They also have 
heard, in the dark and the distance behind them, 
the noise of the horsemen of Herod. 

Now it is this sensation of stemming a stream, 
of ten thousand things all pouring one way, 
labels, titles, monuments, metaphors, modes 
of address, assumptions in controversy, that 
make an Englishman in Ireland know that he 
is in a strange land. Nor is he merely be- 
wildered, as among a medley of strange things. 
On the contrary, if he has any sense, he soon 
finds them unified and simplified to a single 
impression, as if he were talking to a strange 
person. He cannot define it, because nobody 
204 



A QUESTION 

can define a person, and nobody can define 
a nation. He can only see it, smell it, hear it, 
handle it, bump into it, fall over it, kill it, be 
killed for it, or be damned for doing it wrong. 
He must be content with these mere hints of 
its existence; but he cannot define it, because 
it is like a person, and no book of logic will 
undertake to define Aunt Jane or Uncle 
William. We can only say, with more or less 
mournful conviction, that if Aunt Jane is not 
a person, there is no such thing as a person. 
And I say with equal conviction that if Ireland 
is not a nation, there is no such thing as a 
nation. France is not a nation, England is not 
a nation; there is no such thing as patriotism 
on this planet. Any Englishman, of any 
party, with any proposal, may well clear his 
mind of cant about that preliminary question. 
It we free Ireland, we must free it to be a 
nation ; if we go on repressing Ireland, we are 
repressing a nation ; if we are right to repress 
Ireland, we are right to repress a nation. After 
that we may consider what can be done, 
205 



AN EXAMPLE AND A QUESTION 

according to our opinions about the respect due 
to patriotism, the reality of cosmopoUtan and 
imperial alternatives, and so on. I will debate 
with the man who does not want mankind 
divided into nations at all; I can imagine a case 
for the man who wants specially to restrain one 
particular nation, as I would restrain anti- 
national Prussia. But I will not argue with a 
man about whether Ireland is a nation, or 
about the yet more awful question of whether 
it is an island. I know there is a sceptical 
philosophy which suggests that all ultimate 
ideas are only penultimate ideas, and there- 
fore perhaps that all islands are really penin- 
sulas. But I will claim to know what I mean 
by an island and what I mean by an individual; 
and when I think suddenly of my experience in 
the island in question, the impression is a 
single one; the voices mingle in a human voice 
which I should know if I heard it again, calling 
in the distance; the crowds dwindle into a 
single figure whom I have seen long ago upon 
a strange hill-side, and she walking like a queen. 
206 



CHAPTER IX 



\ 



BELFAST AND THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 

Of that cloud of dream which seems to drift 
over so many Irish poems and impressions, I 
felt very little in Ireland. There is a real mean- 
ing in this suggestion of a mystic sleep, but 
it does not mean what most of us imagine, and 
is not to be found where we expect it. On the 
contrary, I think the most vivid impression 
the nation left on me, was that it was almost 
unnaturally wide awake. I might almost say 
that Ireland suffers from insomnia. This is 
not only literally true, of those tremendous 
talks, the prolonged activities of rich and rest- 
less intellects, that can burn up the nights from 
darkness to daybreak. It is true on the doubt- 
ful as well as the delightful side, and the 
temperament has something of the morbid 
vigilance and even of the irritability of insomnia. 
209 



BELFAST AND THE 

Its lucidity is not only superhuman, but it is 
sometimes in the true sense inhuman. Its 
intellectual clarity cannot resist the temptation 
to intellectual cruelty. If I had to sum up in 
a sentence the one fault really to be found with 
the Irish, I could do it simply enough. I should 
say it saddened me that I liked them all so 
much better than they liked each other. But 
it is our supreme stupidity that this is always 
taken as meaning that Ireland is a sort of 
Donnybrook Fair. It is really quite the reverse 
of a merely rowdy and irresponsible quarrel. 
So far from fighting with shillelaghs, they 
fight far too much with rapiers; their tempta- 
tion is in the very nicety and even delicacy of 
the thrust. Of course there are multitudes 
who make no such deadly use of the national 
irony; but it is sufficiently common for even 
these to suffer from it; and after a time I 
began to understand a little that burden about 
bitterness of speech, which recurs so often 
in the songs of Mr Yeats and other Irish 
poets. 

210 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 

Though hope fall from you and love decay 
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue. 

But there is nothing dreamy about the bitter- 
ness ; the worst part of it is the fact that the 
criticisms always have a very lucid and logical 
touch of truth. It is not for us to lecture the 
Irish about forgiveness, who have given them 
so much to forgive. But if some one who had 
not lost the right to preach to them, if St Pat- 
rick were to return to preach, he would find 
that nothing had failed, through all those ages 
of agony, of faith and honour and endurance; 
but I think he might possibly say, what I have 
no right to say, a word about charity. 

There is indeed one decisive sense in which 
the Irish are very poetical; in that of giving 
a special and serious social recognition to 
poetry. I have sometimes expressed the fancy 
that men in the Golden Age might spontane- 
ously talk in verse; and it is really true that 
half the Irish talk is in verse. Quotation 
becomes recitation. But it is much too 

211 



BELFAST AND THE 

rhythmic to resemble our own theatrical 
recitations. This is one of my own strongest 
and most sympathetic memories, and one of 
my most definable reasons for having felt extra- 
ordinarily happy in Dublin. It was a paradise 
of poets, in which a man who may feel inclined 
to mention a book or two of Paradise Lost^ or 
illustrate his meaning with the complete ballad 
of the Ancient Mariner^ feels he will be better 
understood than elsewhere. But the more this 
very national quality is noted, the less it will be 
mistaken for anything merely irresponsible, or 
even merely emotional. The shortest way of 
stating the truth is to say that poetry plays the 
part of music. It is in every sense of the phrase 
a social function. A poetical evening is as 
natural as a musical evening, and being as 
natural it becomes what is called artificial. As 
in some circles * Do you play } ' is rather 
* Don't you play ? ' these Irish circles would be 
surprised because a man did not recite rather 
than because he did. A hostile critic, especially 
an Irish critic, might possibly say that the Irish 

212 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 

are poetical because they are not sufficiently 
musical. I can imagine Mr Bernard Shaw 
saying something of the sort. But it might 
well be retorted that they are not merely 
musical because they will not consent to be 
merely emotional. It is far truer to say that 
they give a reasonable place to poetry, than that 
they permit any particular poetic interference 
with reason. * But I, whose virtues are the 
definitions of the analytical mind,' says Mr 
Yeats, and any one who has been in the 
atmosphere will know what he means. In so 
far as such things stray from reason, they tend 
rather to ritual than to riot. Poetry is in 
Ireland what humour is in America; it is an 
institution. The Englishman, who is always 
for good and evil the amateur, takes both in a 
more occasional and even accidental fashion. 
It must always be remembered here that the 
ancient Irish civiHsation had a high order of 
poetry, which was not merely mystical, but 
rather mathematical. Like Celtic ornament, 
Celtic verse tended too much to geometrical 
213 



BELFAST AND THE 

patterns. If this was irrational, it was not by 
excess of emotion. It might rather be described 
as irrational by excess of reason. The antique 
hierarchy of minstrels, each grade with its own 
complicated metre, suggests that there was 
something Chinese about a thing so inhumanly 
civilised. Yet all this vanished etiquette is 
somehow in the air in Ireland; and men and 
women move to it, as to the steps of a lost 
dance. 

Thus, whether we consider the sense in 
which the Irish are really quarrelsome, or the 
sense in which they are really poetical, we find 
that both lead us back to a condition of clarit) 
which seems the very reverse of a mere dream. 
In both cases Ireland is critical, and even 
self-critical. The bitterness I have ventured 
to lament is not Irish bitterness against the 
English; that I should assume as not only 
inevitable, but substantially justifiable. It is 
Irish bitterness against the Irish; the remarks 
of one honest Nationalist about another honest 
Nationalist. Similarly, while they are fond of 
214 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 

poetry, they are not always fond of poets, and 
there is plenty of satire in their conversation on 
the subject. I have said that half the talk may 
consist of poetry; I might almost say that the 
other half may consist of parody. All these 
things amount to an excess of vigilance and 
realism; the mass of the people watch and pray, 
but even those who never pray never cease to 
watch. If they idealise sleep, it is as the sleep- 
less do; it might almost be said that they can 
only dream of dreaming. If a dream haunts 
them, it is rather as something that escapes 
them; and indeed some of their finest poetry 
is rather about seeking fairyland than about 
finding it. Granted all this, I may say that 
there was one place in Ireland where I did 
seem to find it, and not merely to seek it. 
There was one spot where I seemed to see the 
dream itself in possession, as one might see 
from afar a cloud resting on a single hill. 
There a dream, at once a desire and a delusion, 
brooded above a whole city. That place was 
Belfast. 

215 



BELFAST AND THE 

The description could be justified even 
literally and in detail. A man told me in 
north-east Ulster that he had heard a mother 
warning her children away from some pond, 
or similar place of danger, by saying, * Don't 
you go there; there are wee popes there.' A 
country where that could be said is like Elfland 
as compared to England. If not exactly a 
land of fairies, it is at least a land of gobHns. 
There is something charming in the fancy of 
a pool full of these peculiar elves, like so many 
efts, each with his tiny triple crown or crossed 
keys complete. That is the difference between 
this manufacturing district and an English 
manufacturing district, like that of Manchester. 
There are numbers of sturdy Nonconformists 
in Manchester, and doubtless they direct some 
of their educational warnings against the 
system represented by the Archbishop of 
Canterbury. But nobody in Manchester, how- 
ever Nonconformist, tells even a child that a 
puddle is a sort of breeding place for Arch- 
bishops of Canterbury, little goblins in gaiters 
216 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 

and aprons. It may be said that it is a very 
stagnant pool that breeds that sort of efts. 
But whatever view we take of it, it remains 
true, to begin with, that the paradox could be 
proved merely from superficial things like 
superstitions. Protestant Ulster reeks of super- 
stition ; it is the strong smell that really comes 
like a blast out of Belfast, as distinct from 
Birmingham or Brixton. But to me there is 
always something human and almost human- 
ising about superstition; and I really think 
that such lingering legends about the Pope, 
as a being as distant and dehumanised as the 
King of the Cannibal Islands, have served as 
a sort of negative folk-lore. And the same may 
be said, in so far as it is true that the commer- 
cial province has retained a theology as well as 
a mythology. Wherever men are still theo- 
logical there is still some chance of their being 
logical. And in this the Calvinist Ulsterman 
may be more of a Catholic Irishman than is 
commonly realised, especially by himself. 
Attacks and apologies abound about the 
217 



BELFAST AND THE 

matter of Belfast bigotry; but bigotry is by no 
means the worst thing in Belfast. I rather 
think it is the best. Nor is it the strongest 
example of what I mean, when I say that 
Belfast does really live in a dream. The other 
and more remarkable fault of the society has 
indeed a religious root; for nearly everything 
in history has a religious root, and especially 
nearly everything in Irish history. Of that 
theoretical origin in theology I may say some- 
thing in a moment; it will be enough to say 
here that what has produced the more promin- 
ent and practical evil is ultimately the theology 
itself, but not the habit of being theological. 
It is the creed, but not the faith. In so far 
as the Ulster Protestant really has a faith, he 
is really a fine fellow; though perhaps not 
quite so fine a fellow as he thinks himself. 
And that is the chasm; and can be most 
shortly stated as I have often stated it in such 
debates : by saying that the Protestant generally 
says, * I am a good Protestant,* while the 
Catholic always says, * I am a bad Catholic/ 
218 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 

When I say that Belfast is dominated by a 
dream, I mean it in the strict psychological 
sense; that something inside the mind is 
stronger than everything outside it. Nonsense 
is not only stronger than sense, but stronger 
than the senses. The idea in a man's head can 
eclipse the eyes in his head. Very worthy and 
kindly merchants told me there was no poverty 
in Belfast. They did not say there was less 
poverty than was commonly alleged, or less 
poverty than there had been, or less than there 
was in similar places elsewhere. They said 
there was none. As a remark about the 
Earthly Paradise or the New Jerusalem, it 
would be arresting. As a remark about the 
streets, through which they and I had both 
passed a few moments before, it was simply 
a triumph of the sheer madness of the imagina- 
tion of man. These eminent citizens of Belfast 
received me in the kindest and most courteous 
fashion, and I would not willingly say anything 
in criticism of them beyond what is necessary 
for the practical needs of their country and 

I.I. 219 p 



BELFAST AND THE 

mine. But indeed I think the greatest criticism 
on them, is that they would not understand 
what the criticism means. I will therefore 
clothe it in a parable, which is none the worse 
for having also been a real incident. When 
told there was no poverty in Belfast, I had 
remarked mildly that the people must have a 
singular taste in dress. I was gravely assured 
that they had indeed a most singular taste in 
dress. I was left with the general impression 
that wearing shirts or trousers decorated with 
large holes at irregular intervals was a pardon- 
able form of foppery or fashionable extrava- 
gance. And it will always be a deep indwelling 
delight, in the memories of my life, that just 
as these city fathers and I came out on to the 
steps of the hotel, there appeared before us one 
of the raggedest of the ragged little boys I had 
seen, asking for a penny. I gave him a penny, 
whereon this group of merchants was suddenly 
transfigured into a sort of mob, vociferating, 
* Against the law! Against the law!' and 
bundled him away. I hope it is not unamiable 

220 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 

to be so much entertained by that vision of a 
mob of magistrates, so earnestly shooing away 
a soHtary child like a cat. Anyhow, they knew 
not what they did; and, what is worse, knew 
not that they knew not. And they would not 
understand, if I told them, what legend might 
have been made about that child, in the 
Christian ages of the world. 

The point is here that the evil in the delusion 
does not consist in bigotry, but in vanity. It 
is not that such a Belfast man thinks he is 
right; for any honest man has a right to think 
he is right. It is that he does think he is good, 
not to say great; and no honest man can reach 
that comfortable conviction without a course 
of intellectual dishonesty. What cuts this 
spirit off from Christian common sense is the 
fact that the delusion, like most insane delusions, 
is merely egotistical. It is simply the pleasure 
of thinking extravagantly well of oneself, and 
unlimited indulgence in that pleasure is far 
more weakening than any indulgence in drink 
or dissipation. But so completely does it 

221 



BELFAST AND THE 

construct an unreal cosmos round the ego, that 
the criticism of the world cannot be felt even 
for worldly purposes. I could give many- 
examples of this element in Belfast, as compared 
even with Birmingham or Manchester. The 
Lord Mayor of Manchester may not happen to 
know much about pictures, but he knows men 
who know about them. But the Belfast 
authorities will exhibit a maniacally bad picture 
as a masterpiece, merely because it glorifies 
Belfast. No man dare put up such a picture 
in Manchester, within a stone's-throw of Mr 
Charles Rowley. I care comparatively little 
about the case of aesthetics ; but the case is even 
clearer in ethics. So wholly are these people 
sundered from more Christian traditions that 
their very boasts lower them; and they abase 
themselves when they mean to exalt them- 
selves. It never occurs to them that their 
strange inside standards do not always impress 
outsiders. A great employer introduced me to 
several of his very intelligent employees, and 
I can readily bear witness to the sincerity of the 

222 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 

great Belfast delusion even among many of the 
poorer men of Belfast. But the sincere efforts 
of them and their master, to convince me that 
a union with the Catholic majority under Home 
Rule was intolerable to them, all went to one 
tune, which recurred with a kind of chorus, 
* We won't have the likes of them making laws 
for the likes of us.* It never seemed to cross 
their minds that this is not a high example of 
any human morality; that judged by pagan 
verecundia or Christian humility or modern 
democratic brotherhood, it is simply the remark 
of a snob. The man in question is quite 
innocent of all this; he has no notion of 
modesty, or even of mock modesty. He is not 
only superior, but he thinks it a superiority 
to claim superiority. 

It is here that we cannot avoid theology, 
because we cannot avoid theory. For the 
point is that even in theory the one religious 
atmosphere now differs from the other. That 
the difference had historically a religious root 
is really unquestionable; but anyhow it is very 
223 



BELFAST AND THE 

deeply rooted. The essence of Calvinism was 
certainty about salvation; the essence of 
Catholicism is uncertainty about salvation. 
The modern and materialised form of that 
certainty is superiority ; the belief of a man in 
a fixed moral aristocracy of men like himself. 
But the truth concerned here is that, by this 
time at any rate, the superiority has become 
a doctrine as well as an indulgence. I doubt if 
this extreme school of Protestants believe in 
Christian humility even as an ideal. I doubt 
whether the more honest of them would even 
profess to believe in it. This can be clearly seen 
by comparing it with other Christian virtues, 
of which this decayed Calvinism offers at least 
a version, even to those who think it a perver- 
sion. Puritanism is a version of purity; if 
we think it a parody of purity. Philanthropy 
is a version of charity; if we think it a parody 
of charity. But in all this commercial Protest- 
antism there is no version of humility; there is 
not even a parody of humility. Humility is not 
an ideal. Humility is not even a hypocrisy. 
224 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 

There is no institution, no commandment, no 
common form of words, no popular pattern or 
traditional tale, to tell anybody in any fashion 
that there is any such thing as a peril of 
spiritual pride. In short, there is here a school 
of thought and sentiment that does definitely 
regard self-satisfaction as a strength, as against 
the strong Christian tradition in the rest of the 
country that does as definitely regard it as a 
weakness. That is the real moral issue in the 
modern struggle in Ireland, nor is it confined 
to Ireland. England has been deeply infected 
with this Pharisaical weakness, but as I have 
said, England takes things vaguely where 
Ireland takes them vividly. The men of 
Belfast offer that city as something supreme, 
unique and unrivalled; and they are very 
nearly right. There is nothing exactly like it 
in the industrialism of this country; but for 
all that, the fight against its religion of arro- 
gance has been fought out elsewhere and on a 
larger field. There is another centre and 
citadel from which this theory, of strength in 
225 



BELFAST AND THE 

a self-hypnotised superiority, has despised 
Christendom. There has been a rival city to 
Belfast; and its name was Berlin. 

Historians of all religions and no religion 
may yet come to regard it as an historical fact, 
I fancy, that the Protestant Reformation of the 
sixteenth century (at least in the form it 
actually took) was a barbaric breakdown, like 
that Prussianism which was the ultimate pro- 
duct of that Protestantism. But however this 
may be, historians v/ill always be interested to 
note that it produced certain curious and 
characteristic things, which are worth studying 
whether we like or dislike them. And one of its 
features, I fancy, has been this ; that it has had 
the power of producing certain institutions 
which progressed very rapidly to great wealth 
and power; which the world regarded at a 
certain moment as invincible; and which the 
world, at the next moment, suddenly discovered 
to be intolerable. It was so with the whole of 
that Calvinist theology, of which Belfast is now 
left as the lonely missionary. It was so, even 
226 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 

in our own time, with the whole of that industrial 
capitalism of which Belfast is now the besieged 
and -almost deserted outpost. And it was so 
with Berlin as it was with Belfast; and a subtle 
Prussian might almost complain of a kind of 
treachery, in the abruptness with which the 
world woke up and found it wanting; in the 
suddenness of the reaction that struck it 
impotent, so soon after it had been counted on 
omnipotent. These things seem to hold all the 
future, and in one flash they are things of the 
past. 

Belfast is an antiquated novelty. Such a 
thing is still being excused for seeming parvenu 
when it is discovered to htpassL For instance, 
it is only by coming in touch with som^ of the 
controversies surrounding the Convention, that 
an Englishman could realise how much the 
mentality of the Belfast leader is not so much 
that of a remote seventeenth century Whig, as 
that of a recent nineteenth century Radical. 
His conventionality seemed to be that of a 
Victorian rather than a Williamite, and to be 
227 



BELFAST AND THE 

less limited by the Orange Brotherhood than 
by the Cobden Club. This is a fact most 
successfully painted and pasted over by the 
big brushes of our own Party System, which 
has the art of hiding so many glaring facts. 
This Unionist Party in Ireland is very largely 
concerned to resist the main reform advocated 
by the Unionist Party in England. A political 
humorist, who understood the Cobden tradi- 
tion of Belfast and the Chamberlain tradition 
of Birmingham, could have a huge amount of 
fun appealing from one to the other; con- 
gratulating Belfast on the bold Protectionist 
doctrines prevalent in Ireland; adjuring Mr 
Bonar Law and the Tariff Reformers never to 
forget the fight made by Belfast for the sacred 
principles of Free Trade. But the fact that the 
Belfast school is merely the Manchester school 
is only one aspect of this general truth about 
the abrupt collapse into antiquity: a sudden 
superannuation. The whole march of that 
Manchester industrialism is not only halted 
but turned; the whole position is outflanked 
228 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 

by new forces coming from new directions; 
the wealth of the peasantries blocks the road 
in front of it; the general strike has risen 
menacing its rear. That strange cloud of self- 
protecting vanity may still permit Belfast to 
believe in Belfast, but Britain does not really 
believe in Belfast. Philosophical forces far 
wider and deeper than politics have under- 
mined the conception of progressive Protestant- 
ism in Ireland. I should say myself that mere 
English ascendancy in that island became 
intellectually impossible on the day when 
Shaftesbury introduced the first Factory Act, 
and on the day when Newman published the 
first pages of the Apologia, Both men were 
certainly Tories and probably Unionists. 
Neither were connected with the subject or 
with each other; the one hated the Pope and 
the other the Liberator. But industrialism was 
never again self-evidently superior after the 
first event, or Protestantism self-evidently 
superior after the second. And it needed a 
towering and self-evident superiority to excuse 
229 



BELFAST AND THE 

the English rule in Ireland. It is only on the 
ground of unquestionably doing good that 
men can do so much evil as that. 

Some Orangemen before the war indulged 
in a fine rhetorical comparison between William 
of Prussia and William of Orange, and openly 
suggested that the new Protestant Deliverer 
from the north would come from North 
Germany. I was assured by my more moderate 
hosts in Belfast that such Orangemen could not 
be regarded as representative or even respon- 
sible. On that I cannot pronounce. The 
Orangemen may not have been representative; 
they may not have been responsible; but I am 
quite sure they were right. I am quite sure 
those poor fanatics were far nearer the nerve of 
historical truth than professional politicians like 
Sir Edward Carson or industrial capitalists like 
Sir George Clark. If ever there was a natural 
alliance in the world, it would have been the 
alliance between Belfast and Berlin. The 
fanatics may be fools, but they have here the 
light by which the foolish things can confound 
230 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 

the wise. It is the brightest spot in Belfast, 
bigotry, for if the light in its body be darkness, 
it is still brighter than the darkness. By the 
vision that goes everywhere with the virility 
and greatness of religion, these men had indeed 
pierced to the Protestant secret and the meaning 
of four hundred years. Their Protestantism is 
Prussianism, not as a term of abuse, but as a 
term of abstract and impartial ethical science. 
Belfast and Berlin are on the same side in the 
deepest of all the spiritual issues involved in 
the war. And that is the simple issue of whether 
pride is a sin, and therefore a weakness. Modern 
mentality, or great masses of it, has seriously 
advanced the view that it is a weakness to 
disarm criticism by self-criticism, and a strength 
to disdain criticism through self-confidence. 
That is the thesis for which Berlin gave battle 
to the older civilisation in Europe; and that 
for which Belfast gave battle to the older 
civilisation in Ireland. It may be, as I suggested 
that such Protestant pride is the old Calvinism, 
with its fixed election of the few. It may be 
231 



BELFAST AND THE 

that the Protestantism is merely Paganism, with 
its brutish gods and giants lingering in corners 
of the more savage north. It may be that the 
Calvinism was itself a recurrence of the 
Paganism. But in any case, I am sure that 
this superiority, which can master men like a 
nightmare, can also vanish like a nightmare. 
And I strongly suspect that in this matter also, 
as in the matter of property as viewed by a 
peasantry, the older civilisation will prove to 
be the real civilisation, and that a healthier 
society will return to regarding pride as a 
pestilence, as the Socialists have already returned 
to regarding avarice as a pestilence. The old 
tradition of Christendom was that the highest 
form of faith was a doubt. It was the doubt 
of a man about his soul. It was admirably 
expressed to me by Mr Yeats, who is no 
champion of Catholic orthodoxy, in stating his 
preference for mediaeval Catholicism as com- 
pared with modern humanitarianism : * Men 
were thinking then about their own sins, and 
now they are always thinking about other 
232 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 

peoples.* And even by the Protestant test of 
progress, pride is seen to be arrested by a 
premature paralysis. Progress is superiority 
to oneself, and it is stopped dead by superiority 
to others. The case is even clearer by the test 
of poetry, which is much more solid and 
permanent than progress. The Superman may 
have been a sort of poem, but he could never 
be any sort of poet. The more we attempt to 
analyse that strange element of wonder, which 
is the soul of all the arts, the more we shall see 
that it must depend on some subordination of 
the self to a glory existing beyond it, and even 
in spite of it. Man always feels as a creature 
when he acts as a creator. When he carves a 
cathedral, it is to make a monster that can 
swallow him. But the Nietzschean nightmare 
of swallowing the world is only a sort of 
yawning. When the evolutionary anarch has 
broken all Hnks and laws and is at last free to 
speak, he finds he has nothing to say. So 
German songs under the imperial eagle fell 
silent like songbirds under a hawk; and it is 
^33 



BELFAST AND THE 

but rarely, and here and there, that a Belfast 
merchant liberates his soul in a lyric. He has 
to get Mr Kipling to write a Belfast poem, in 
a style technically attuned to the Belfast pictures. 
There is the true Tara of the silent harp, and 
the throne and habitation of the dream ; and it 
is there that the Celtic pessimists should weep 
in silence for the end of song. Blowing one's 
own trumpet has not proved a good musical 
education. 

In logic a wise man will always put the cart 
before the horse. That is to say, he will always 
put the end before the means; when he is 
considering the question as a whole. He does 
not construct a cart in order to exercise a horse. 
He employs a horse to draw a cart, and what- 
ever is in the cart. In all modern reasoning 
there is a tendency to make the mere political 
beast of burden more important than the chariot 
of man it is meant to draw. This has led to 
a dismissal of all such spiritual questions in 
favour of what are called social questions ; and 
this to a too facile treatment of things like the 
234 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 

religious question in Belfast. There is a 
religious question; and it will not have an 
irreligious answer. It will not be met by the 
limitation of Christian faith, but rather by the 
extension of Christian charity. But if a man 
says that there is no difference between a 
Protestant and a Catholic, and that both can 
act in an identical fashion everywhere but in 
a church or chapel, he is madly driving the 
cart-horse when he has forgotten the cart. 
A religion is not the church a man goes to but 
the cosmos he lives in; and if any sceptic 
forgets it, the maddest fanatic beating an 
Orange drum about the Battle of the Boyne 
is a better philosopher than he. 

Many uneducated and some educated people 
in Belfast quite sincerely believe that Roman 
priests are fiends, only waiting to rekindle the 
fires of the Inquisition. For two simple 
reasons, however, I declined to take this fact 
as evidence of anything except their sincerity. 
First, because the stories, when reduced to their 
rudiment of truth, generally resolved themselves 

I.I. 235 Q 



BELFAST AND THE 

into the riddle of poor Roman Catholics 
giving money to their own religion, and seemed 
to deplore not so much a dependence on priests 
as an independence of employers. And second, 
for a reason drawn from my own experience, as 
well as common knowledge, concerning the 
Protestant gentry in the south of Ireland. The 
southern Unionists spoke quite without this 
special horror of Catholic priests or peasants. 
They grumbled at them or laughed at them as 
a man grumbles or laughs at his neighbours; 
but obviously they no more dreamed that the 
priest would burn them than that he would eat 
them. If the priests were as black as the black 
Protestants painted them, they would be at 
their worst where they are with the majority, 
and would be known at their worst by the 
minority. It was clear that Belfast held the 
more bigoted tradition, not because it knew 
more of priests, but because it knew less of 
them; not because it was on the spot, but 
because the spot was barred. An even more 
general delusion was the idea that all the 
236 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 

southern Irish dreamed and did no work. I 
pointed out that this also was inconsistent with 
concrete experience; since all over the world 
a man who makes a small farm pay has to work 
very hard indeed. In historic fact, the old 
notion that the Irish peasant did no work, but 
only dreamed, had a simple explanation. It 
merely meant that he did no work for a 
capitalist's profit, but dreamed of some day 
doing work for his own profit. But there may 
also have been this distorted truth in the 
tradition ; that a free peasant, while he extends 
his own work, creates his own holidays. He 
is not idle all day, but he may be idle at any 
time of the day; he does not dream whenever 
he feels inclined, but he does dream whenever 
he chooses. A famous Belfast manufacturer, 
a man of capacity, but one who shook his head 
over the unaccountable prevalence of priests, 
assured me that he had seen peasants in the 
south doing nothing, at all sorts of odd times; 
and this is doubtless the difference between 
the farm and the factory. The same gentleman 
237 



BELFAST AND THE 

showed me over the colossal shipping of 
the great harbour, with all machinery and 
transport leading up to it. No man of any 
imagination would be insensible to such titanic 
experiments of his race; or deny the dark 
poetry of those furnaces fit for Vulcan or those 
hammers worthy of Thor. But as I stood on 
the dock I said to my guide : ' Have you ever 
asked what all this is for ? * He was an 
intelligent man, an exile from metaphysical 
Scotland, and he knew what I meant. * I don't 
know,' he said, 'perhaps we are only insects 
building a coral reef. I don't know what is 
the good of the coral reef.' ' Perhaps,' I said, 
*that is what the peasant dreams about, and 
why he listens to the priest.' 

For there seems to be a fashionable fallacy, 
to the effect that religious equality is something 
to be done and done with, that we may go on 
to the real matter of political equality. In 
philosophy it is the flat contrary that is true. 
Political equality is something to be done and 
done with, that we may go on to the much 
238 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 

more real matter of religion. At the Abbey 
Theatre I saw a forcible play by Mr St John 
Irvine, called The Mixed Marriage^ which I 
should remember if it were only for the beauti- 
ful acting of Miss Maire O'Neill. But the 
play moved me very much as a play ; yet I felt 
that the presence of this fallacy falsified it in 
some measure. The dramatist seemed to resent 
a schism merely because it interfered with a 
strike. But the only object of striking is 
liberty; and the only object of liberty is life : 
a thing wholly spiritual. It is economic liberty 
that should be dismissed as these people dis- 
miss theology. We only get it to forget it. It is 
right that men should have houses, right that 
they should have land, right that they should 
have laws to protect the land; but all these 
things are only machinery to make leisure for 
the labouring soul. The house is only a stage 
set up by stage carpenters for the acting of 
what Mr J. B. Yeats has called ' the drama of 
the home.' All the most dramatic things 
happen at home, from being born to being 
239 



BELFAST AND THE 

dead. What a man thinks about these things 
is his life; and to substitute for them a bustle 
of electioneering and legislation is to wander 
about among screens and pulleys on the wrong 
side of pasteboard scenery, and never to act 
the play. And that play is always a miracle 
play; and the name of its hero is Everyman. 
When I came back from the desolate 
splendour of the Donegal sea and shore, and 
saw again the square garden and the statue 
outside the Dublin hotel, I did not know I was 
returning to something that might well be 
called more desolate. For it was when I 
entered the hotel that I first found that it was 
full of the awful tragedy of the Leinster, I had 
often seen death in a home, but never death 
decimating a vast hostelry; and there was 
something strangely shocking about the empty 
seats of men and women with whom I had 
talked so idly a few days before. It was almost 
as if there was more tragedy in the cutting 
short of such trivial talk than in the sundering 
of life-long ties. But there was all the dignity 
240 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 

as well as the tragedy of man ; and I was glad, 
before I left Ireland, to have seen the nobler 
side of the Anglo-Irish garrison, and to have 
known men of my own blood, however mistaken, 
so enduring the end of things. With the bad 
news from the sea came better news from the 
war; the Teutonic hordes were yielding every- 
where, at the signal of the last advance; 
and with all the emotions of an exile, 
however temporary, I knew that my own land 
was secure. Somehow, the bad and good 
news together turned my mind more and more 
towards England; and all the inner humour 
and insular geniality which even the Irish may 
some day be allowed to understand. As I went 
homewards on the next boat that started from 
the Irish port, and the Wicklow hills receded 
in a rainy and broken sunlight, it was with all 
the simplest of those ancient appetites with 
which a man should come back to his own 
country. Only there clung to me, not to be 
denied, one sentiment about Ireland, one 
sentiment that I could not transfer to England; 
241 



BELFAST AND THE 

which called me like an elfland of so many 
happy figures, from Puck to Pickwick. As I 
looked at those rainy hills I knew at least that 
I was looking, perhaps for the last time, on 
something rooted in the Christian faith. There 
at least the Christian ideal was something more 
than an ideal; it was in a special sense real. 
It was so real that it appeared even in statistics. 
It was so self-evident as to be seen even by 
sociologists. It was a land where our religion 
had made even its vision visible. It had made 
even its unpopular virtues popular. It must 
be, in the times to come, a final testing-place, 
of whether a people that will take that name 
seriously, and even solidly, is fated to suffer or 
to succeed. 

As the long line of the mountain coast 
unfolded before me I had an optical illusion; 
it may be that many have had it before. As 
new lengths of coast and lines of heights were 
unfolded, I had the fancy that the whole land 
was not receding but advancing, like some- 
thing spreading out its arms to the world. A 
242 



RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 

chance shred of sunshine rested, like a riven 
banner, on the hill which I believe is called in 
Irish the Mountain of the Golden Spears ; and 
I could have imagined that the spears and the 
banner were coming on. And in that flash 
I remembered that the men of this island had 
once gone forth, not with the torches of con- 
querors or destroyers, but as missionaries in 
the very midnight of the Dark Ages; like a 
multitude of moving candles, that were the 
light of the world. 



243 



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SIR LIMPIDUS 

By MARMADUKE PICKTHALL 

Author of 'Oriental Encounters,' etc. 

A Novel of the plenteous days before the war. The author has 
essayed the high imaginative task of investing the established order with the 
mantle of romance. It is not the mantle of Don Quixote nor of Tartarin 
de Tarascon : but it is the best and gayest cloak of humour which the 
author could devise consistently with the sentiments of awe and reverence 
with which he naturally approached the subject. 

Extra Crown Svo. Is. net. 



THE QUIETNESS OF DICK 
By R. E. VERNEDE 

Author of 'Letters to His Wife.' 

'Has all the high spirits and gaiety which characterised his writings.* 
^Timss. 

Extra Crown Svo, Is. net* 



THE CARAVAN-MAN 
By ERNEST GOODWIN 

*A happy, charming story, introducing us to a lot of happy people.' 
^Sheffield Daily Telegraph. 

Extra Crown Svo. 7s. net. 



THE SHINING ROAD 

By GEO. AGNEW CHAMBERLAIN 

A first-rate adventure tale/ — Westminster Gazette. 
Extra Crown Svo. 7 s. ne$. 



OVER AND ABOVE 

By J. E. GORDON 

*The goodness of the book is based on certain rare and attractive 
features. Not only by airmen, but also by the laity, Over and Above will 
be read with more than ordinary interest.' — Times. 

Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. 

COCKTAILS 

By Lieut. C. PATRICK THOMPSON 

* This is a collection of very fine stories. No other book has given 
us the atmosphere of adventure and, what is more, of mystery peculiar to 
air-fighting.' — New Witness. 

Extra Crown %vo. Is. Qd. net. 

UNDER THE PERISCOPE 

By Lieut. MARK BENNETT, R.N.R. 

* Bright with entertaining touches and humour.' — Scot&man. 

Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. 

THE PROBLEM CLUB 

By BARRY PAIN 

* Excellent fooling.* — The Times. 

Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net. 
[Second Impression.) 

LOVE LANE 

By J. C. SNAITH 

Author of Mary Plantagenet, etc. 

*It is a splendid, manly, simple story.' — New Witness. 

Extra Crown 8vo. 7s. net. 

[Third Impression.) 



